Michigan is known as the Great Lakes State since it borders on four of the five Great Lakes. Much of the state's economy is dependent at least in part on the supply of water from the lakes either to feed industry or tourism. For years that has been concern in the state about large scale bottlers taking the water from the lakes to package and sell at inflated prices. This has been a particular concern in recent years with dropping lake water levels.

Now the city of Ann Arbor and the state government are fighting back. The city council recently passed a resolution barring city vendors from selling commercial bottled water at city events. The city will start selling reusable water bottles that can be filled with tap water. Meanwhile the state is dropping the threshold for state approval to withdraw water from 2 million gallons a day to 1 million. Municipalities, utilities and large industrial companies will be required to implement water conservation policies. Needless to say bottlers are not happy about these policies and continue to claim that bottled water is healthier in spite of many studies showing that it is usually no better than most municipal tap water and often worse. Regardless of the qualities of bottled water, the fact is the huge quantities of plastic packaging and transportation consume a lot of energy needlessly.

[Source: Ann Arbor News]

The Poland Springs unit of the Nestle company has announced that they are switching over their entire water tanker fleet to running on B5 biodiesel. The company expects the change to yield reductions in carbon dioxide emissions of 1.8 million pounds per year. Poland Spring's use of biodiesel is part of their company wide effort to reduce their environmental footprint that includes a 91 percent internal recycling rate.

While these changes are admirable in and of themselves, the fact remains that the entire bottled water industry in general is one of the most wasteful things that we propagate. Huge amounts of energy are wasted in packaging and distributing water and the petroleum that is consumed to make all the billions of plastic bottles is probably far more than will ever be saved by running some B5 in tanker trucks. Coupled with the reality that most tests of bottled waters have shown them to be of no higher quality than tap water and it's often worse. Some bottled water availability when people are out and about may be okay but people who buy cases of water and take it home to drink it around the house are just wasting their money and energy.

[Source: Nestle Waters (PDF)]