Butterflies

As responsible Butterfliers we’re always thinking about sustainable packaging, choosing paper and card over plastic, choosing recyclable plastic over single-use atrocities, and avoiding polystyrene completely because it’s made from devils’ bumholes. And yet for all our do-gooding we still have a very particular weakness for bottled water.

Back in my Nepal days I was an absolute slave to it. Out there the water supply is so irregular and its quality so poor you’d only give it a go if you fancied shitting it out ten minutes later in its original consistency. And then doing that for the next three weeks until you’re empty, dehydrated and depressed and have sores from sitting on the bog for 18 hours a day. Good times.

We don’t have that worry in the luxury of the developed west. Our water is generally clean and safe and reliably distributed. And it couldn’t be cheaper if it was falling from the sky: In the UK tap water costs about 0.1p per litre, while bottled water costs about 650 times that. And it’s basically the same thing, making its premium price fully bonkers. At least with fizzy pop and flavoured drinks we’re getting a little something for our money, given Irn Bru isn’t already plumbed into our kitchen taps. Except in Glasgow.

Bottled water is stupid. But we’re stupider. Sales of bottled water have continued to rise even as people fret about plastic pollution and bereaved whales. In the UK we’re getting through about 4 billion litres a year; in China 45 billion litres; in the US 63 billion litres, most of it sold in carbon-spewing, oil-based plastic by genocidal capitalists keener on profit than survival.

Keen to greenwash itself, the industry brags about its bottles being recyclable and reusable where facilities exist. Well, similarly, every one of the turds I curl out onto the back of your mum’s head is biodegradable, but it doesn’t mean my behaviour is any more pleasant or necessary. Whether we recycle plastic bottles or not we’re still chugging out oily CO₂ in their production, transport and recycling, still contributing to climate breakdown, still being monumental fannies – and all unnecessarily given the availability of clean, safe, cheap tap water.

Zeroes, we are done with bottled water. It’s one of the most obviously stupid things we’ve invented in our time on the planet, and we invented Kevin Sorbo. Let’s buy reusable, non-plastic bottles and take them with us all the time everywhere. We can fill them from our taps as we set out, saving a ton of carbon and cash, and refill them when we’re out at one of the thousands of refilling points mapped on iOS and Android apps. And if we’re ever caught out without our perma-bottles we’ll go for something in a can as it’ll be less polluting and more recyclable than plasticky water. Together, we can knacker the industry, leave a ton of oil in the ground, leave a ton of carbon unemitted, and look a little less like post-Yuppie, Dasani-buying, gullible, planet-guzzling twats.

Photo credit: The Zero