Water
Why?
Why does Whole Foods sell bottled water? Why is it prominently displayed?
Oh yeah... money.
But here's what I really don't get. The Whole Foods downtown has water for FREE -- and ice -- and paper cups. If you're eating there, and you didn't bring your own drink, or buy a drink in a glass bottle, you don't need to pay for water. But if you look around, lots of people have paid for water.
I think that drinking bottled water is a habit. You buy lunch, you want a drink. Everybody buys something -- a Coke, a juice, whatever.... you buy a water. It's easy to temporarily forget about the environmental impact of the water. That's when it's good to be frugal as well as green. The frugal person is thinking about two things -- the environment, and the fact that he/she doesn't want to pay for something that should be free = more likely to not buy the water.
If you live in Austin and go to WF and get thirsty -- there's free water. It's not prominently displayed, but it's totally free. (And icy!)
Green Church
The Catholic church has added new social sins, including hurting the environment. At the time, I wondered if the church would be changing its ways. A friend reports that at her local parish, they switched to ceramic cups for coffee. Yeah!
Yesterday I attended a Protestant service that included communion. At a Catholic mass, each person sips wine from a communal chalice. At the service I attended yesterday, tiny plastic (non-recyclable!) cups with tiny sips of grape juice were passed out. It seemed like a lot of waste.
Is this typical for Protestant services? I've been to other services, and plastic cups were always involved, but that may just be coincidence. Are there Protestant churches that serve grape juice in some other way? I guess that it is to reduce transmission of germs. When I go to church, I don't receive the wine part of communion if I'm sick, because of the communal chalice.
P.S. Please don't take this as some sort of Protestant vs. Catholic debate. I'm just noticing a difference that I had not noticed before.
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A friend of mine from Spain told me all of these points regarding how tap water is better regulated and fresher than bottled water. Any of us would know that, but sometimes I wish I had titbits of Horrifying Statistics on hand, like...
"you know, it's likely that water has spent months in that bottle, baking in a truck, riding on a train, then refrigerated for a couple weeks before you got it" (made up) or...
"you know, if person in NYC used a Nalgene for a week, 24 MILLION bottles would be saved" (real statistic I copied down).
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