Drinking water is good for you; no doubt. The question of what to drink it from, though, is baffling.
I have long been a user and re-user of your standard Dasani or Deer Park bottles. I’d refill them from the tap and recycle them when they got too gnarly to drink from. I never bought a Nalgene, not because I was so prescient about the chemical-leaching problems that have recently come to light, but because I don’t really like signing on for product trends. I have, however, been wanting a Sigg or other metal water bottle, since it does seem likely that they’re healthier and would last much longer than the cheap plastics. So far, though, the cost ($20-25) and the trend-aversion thing has kept me from committing.
And then along came this:
It’s a plastic bottle someone gave me that, according to the label, is "Made from plants, not crude oil." The brand name is Primo. The website has pictures of a healthy-looking white lady in yoga clothes, leaves with water droplets, and other eco-images.
What else can we find out about this? Well, the recycling symbol on the bottom is a "7," meaning that it’s tough to recycle—although Better World Betty’s search tool tells me I can take it to the UVA Recycling Park; good to know. And poking around on the Primo website gets me to a series of videos explaining the whole "made from plants" thing.
They’re kind of low-level in terms of information delivery. "Plants" is used as a generic, friendly-sounding term for Nebraska-grown corn, which is very likely to mean a genetically-engineered, conventionally-farmed monoculture harvested and transported by fossil-fueled machinery (a big tractor and a semi-truck actually make cameo appearances in the video; hello, pollution!). And whoops, was that a quick mention of Cargill, one of the biggest and baddest agribusiness corporations in the world? Yep, it’s their factory that makes the "plants" into "plastic." Hm.
Tradeoffs, people. Big tradeoffs.
Also, Primo water tastes like plastic.
So what’s your H2O solution?
