Bottled Water Crisis?

If you are like me, you sneered at the health nuts who first began the bottled water craze. But nowadays, it is fashionable to drink the water and it is an easier to buy a water from the vending machine than to carry around a thermos bottle to refill from a public water fountain. So both the motivated (health nuts) and the lazy (the rest of us) are buying more and more bottled water, despite the fact that it costs hundreds of times more than drinking from the tap.

Well, it appears we have a good reason to go back to carrying around thermos bottles.

The study said that demand for bottled water soared in developing countries between 1999 and 2004 with consumption tripling in India and more than doubling in China during that period.
That has translated into massive costs in packaging the water, usually in plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which is derived from crude oil, and then transporting it by boat, train or on land.
"Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 US cars for a year," according to the study. "Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year."

I wonder how long until the eco-nuts are debating whether fur, bottled water, or genetically modified foods are the worst threat to the planet. Methinks maybe this should be part of a Bush plan to reduce our dependence on foreign oil as well.