"The Story of Bottled Water"

When you test bottled water against tap water, the water is not consistently cleaner. In many ways, bottled water is less regulated than tap water. Further, in taste tests across the country people consistently choose tap water over bottled water. Bottled water costs about 2000x as much as tap water. People in the U.S. buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week. The origin story of the water bottle explains how bottles became such a ubiquitous item in our society.

In the 1970s soft drink companies got worried when they saw their sales leveling off. In response to this, they started selling water bottles. People initially dismissed water bottles as a fad thinking the concept was ridiculous since they had access to free water. Water bottle companies then began to manufacture demand. They did this by making people scared, seducing them, and misleading them. They made ads to promote their products and dismiss tap water. They then hid the reality of their products behind fantasies of mountain streams and pristine nature. One third of all bottled water comes from tap water including Dasani and Aquafina. Nestle continued the misleading in proclaiming that bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world, which is a blatant lie.

Oil is used to make water bottles. Each year, making the amount of water bottles used in the U.S. takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars. Additional energy and oil is used to ship the bottles around the planet. Afterwards, the bottles must be disposed of. Eighty percent of all water bottles end up in landfills where they will sit for thousands of years or they are put in incinerators where they're burned releasing toxic pollution. The rest gets collected for recycling. The water bottles that are collected for recycling are often downcycled into lower quality products which will be thrown away later. The parts that can't be downcycled are thrown away.

Another aspect of the misleading, scaring and seducing of consumers that water bottle companies have undertaken is slandering the other product--tap water. These companies want us to think that tap water is dirty and that bottled water is the best alternative. The irony of this is that not only is that claim unfounded, since it has been proven that water bottles generally don't have consistently cleaner water, but in the intances where the water is polluted, making water bottles a safer alternative, water bottle companies are partially to blame for this water pollution.

If you would like to learn more, view the following video:
https://vimeo.com/10441794

Soil and Symbiosis

One incredibly beneficial and all-too-often overlooked method of farming is permaculture farming. Permaculture farming involves the development of agricultural ecosystems that are intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient. One farm which abides by permaculture methods of farming is the Polyface Farm located in Swoope, Virginia. At this farm, the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, rabbits, and turkeys have a symbiotic relationship in which they all perform ecological services for one another. To illustrate this, on the farm, three days after the cows have grazed the field, the chickens are released onto the field where they dig through the cow patties, eating the maggots, larvae, and flies, spreading the manure out, and releasing nitrogenous manure. This all allows for the enrichment of the soil. This process produces incredible yields. On only 100 acres of land, the Polyface Farm produces 40,000 lbs of beef, 30,000 lbs of pork, 25,000 dozen eggs, 20,000 broilers, 1,000 turkeys, and 1,000 rabbits worth of food. This is the product of permaculture farming. In addition to this, when the cows graze the grass, a lot of leaf mass is lost. After this, the grass, in order to keep the root mass to leaf mass ratio correct, sheds some of its roots. The species in the soil then chew through those roots and decompose them, resulting in new soil.

Keeping with the discussion of soil and sustainability, another overlooked aspect of sustainability is the importance and potential of soil as a carbon pool. Carbon rich soils act like giant sponges, absorbing water during floods and providing it to plants in times of drought. Further, adding carbon to soil makes the land much more productive. If we were to to increase soil carbon by 0.4% per year we could store 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Land management practices increase potential to store carbon- practices like keeping soil covered with plants, increasing crop diversity, composting, and carefully planned grazing are proven ways to put carbon back into the soil.

To learn more about the information addressed in this blog, watch the following videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxqBzrx9yIE

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pollan_gives_a_plant_s_eye_view