Save the World, Save Your Money

Whenever we’ve seen Jack Nicholson walking down the red carpet to the annual Academy Awards night, we’ve thought to ourselves “There he is with that bottle of water again—I wonder if he’s still smoking pot and getting cotton mouth just like the ol’ ‘Easy Rider’ days.”

Carrying a bottle of water has become the modern homologue of the old cowboy canteen.

Sometimes technology doesn’t improve our lifestyle, sometimes it’s just plain wrong. A canteen was better because it was reusable and indestructible.

A few months ago, San Francisco’s mayor asked the citizens of San Francisco to stop consuming bottled water because they were sending more than 300,000 plastic bottles to the garbage dump every single day.

We’d be willing to bet that water from the taps of all cities in the Red River Valley is clean enough to be bottled water.
According to Elizabeth Royte’s new book “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It”, Americans bought nearly $11 billion worth of bottled water in 2006. If we had just gone to a faucet for a drink, we would have spent one ten thousandth of that, or only about $1 million. That would have left Americans more than $10 billion to save.

Royte also discovered that each year all those bottles consume 17 million barrels of oil just to make the darn things.

So what can we do to save the Earth?

We can begin by buying a stainless steel canteen.

Then we can drink our own valley’s clean, refreshing water.