stop buying water

Like most people, I’m frustrated over the plastic pollution problem and wonder if anything I do will make a difference. So last week Craig and I met after work at Hanauma Bay to attend a talk given by a speaker representing Plastic Free Hawaii, a branch of the Kokua Hawaii Foundation started by musician Jack Johnson and his wife, Kim. The charitable organization is dedicated to environmental education, one being a program to reduce our consumption of single-use plastic.

And there I sat with my Plastic Free Hawaii bag full of single-use plastic. I had stopped at a grocery store for our dinner of sushi and drinks.

The subjects of plastic use, recycling, landfills, fishing gear and burning trash for electricity are so complex, and so biased, that after listening to the Hanauma Bay talk and spending hours on the internet, I’m still not convinced of the best way to deal with our island trash.

I am, however, convinced of one thing: We must stop buying drinking water in plastic bottles.

In one of the most successful marketing rip-offs of our lifetime, corporations have convinced people they need to buy water. Bottling companies have also persuaded people that to be healthy they should drink water all day long in substantial quantities.

The doctors I know think that the advertising to drink more (meaning buy more) water has caused people to be obsessed about dehydration. Feeling thirsty, they tell me, is not harmful. Pay attention to this natural drive, and when it happens, drink something.

A mind-boggling 50 billion plastic bottles of water are sold in the U.S. each year. That’s just one number I chose for this column, but the internet has dozens of websites offering nearly any drinking water statistic you prefer to believe.

I prefer to believe that Hawaii’s tap water is of high quality. That’s why I was so angry recently when I heard a vendor at the Honolulu airport tell a visitor that she needed to buy a bottle of water to go with her sandwich because you can’t drink tap water in Hawaii.

Hawaii has some of the purest water in the country. The vendor told me, though, he doesn’t believe that.

If you don’t trust government reports or scientific studies, or don’t like the taste of your water, install a filter on your kitchen faucet. If you prefer sparkling water, buy a Soda Stream machine that makes it.

The ever-changing pluses and minuses of recycling, HPOWER, packaging, waste dumps and drinking water are hard to sort out in our overcrowded, throw-away world. But to me there’s no question about buying water. This swindle of the century litters oceans, fouls beaches, fills trash cans and stokes fears of illness.

What with packaging as it is today, it’s nearly impossible to not buy plastic. Not buying water, though, and spreading the word, is one big thing we can do to help.

It’s one more reason to love visiting, and living in, Hawaii. It’s safe to drink the water.

-- Susan Scott, Ocean Watch, Star Advertiser, 1/19/19