A Thousand Bottles a Second A) Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy and open up a plastic bottle of commercially produced water, and every second of every day in the United States, a thousand plastic bottles are thrown away. Eighty-five million bottles a day. More than thirty billion bottles a year at a cost to consumers of tens of billions of dollars. And for every bottle consumed in the U.S., another four are consumed around the world. B) How did water go from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last one hundred years? What does it mean for us to bottle and sell our most basic necessity? The story of bottled water is a story with big numbers: billions of gallons or liters sold; billions of bottles produced, used, and thrown away; tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in sales; billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants produced. But it is also a story that should be understood in a broader context (背景). It is also about a billion people worldwide without access to safe and affordable drinking water, and billions of illnesses and millions of deaths every year -- mostly among small children -- from preventable water-related diseases. C) People usually say they buy bottled water for four major reasons: fear of their tap (水龙头) water, convenience, taste, and style. The news is filled with stories about water contamination and so we start to fear that our tap water is polluted by things we cannot see or smell. We seek the convenience of little packages of water that are available (可获得的) wherever and whenever we want them because we can no longer find a clean, working water fountain. Sometimes we really don’t like how our tap water tastes. And we’re misguided by intensive advertising and believed that this or that brand of commercial water will make us healthier, skinnier, or more popular. D) So we’ve turned to the bottle, believing that paying a thousand times more for individually packaged plastic throwaway containers of water than for readily available tap water is a reasonable decision rather than economic, environmental, and social blindness. Here we seem to lose sight of the fact that while we turn away from the tap, the poorest people in the poorest countries of the world, who have neither safe tap water nor money to buy bottled water, drink whatever is available, get sick, and often die. This sharp contrast leads to a strange reality: Suburban shoppers in America carry cases of plastic water bottles from the store back to homes supplied with unlimited piped drinkable water in a sad and unintentional parody (滑稽模仿) of the labor of girls and women in Africa, who spend countless backbreaking hours carrying containers of dirty water from distant contaminated sources to homes with no water at all. E) I have to admit having conflicting feelings about bottled water. On rare occasions I will buy and consume bottled water. The problems of the entire bottled water industry are so clear and obvious that they deserve attention. Yet bottled water is neither the cause of, nor the solution to, our larger water problems. If the sale of bottled water were to magically disappear tomorrow or somehow be forbidden in our stores, our global water problems and the need to pursue the path of sustainable water management and use would still remain. The bottled water companies argue that the problems and concerns that cause people to buy bottled water are not the fault of the industry; rather, they say the industry is responding to a demand due to problems in our water system, which they did not cause and cannot fix. This argument cannot be dismissed lightly. There are many places on this planet where tap water is unsafe or unavailable because of the failure of governments to meet the basic needs of their people. F) But the bottled water companies cannot be held completely blameless -- some of them are no better than old-time snake-oil salesmen selling "magic" oil. At times, they have cleverly and even openly worked to speak negatively about tap water and to raise fears of unseen contamination in order to increase their own sales. They have pressed hard to prevent effective plastic recycling programs. And they have used the regular advertising and marketing tools of fear, style, and image to drive people toward their product and away from the tap. G) What’s really being risked? In the end, the arguments for and against bottled water are more than simply environmental or economic. The arguments have deeper psychological, philosophical and political implications (含义) in the human right to water, free markets, the appropriate role of governments, and conflicting visions of the future. Contrasting forces are also at work, including the anti-globalization movement, the growing effort to be "green," and the newly awakened concern about climate change and its root cause -- our energy use. H) It is possible that we will look back in a few decades at a short-lived bottled water craze and wonder what we were thinking. But if we don’t address our growing water crisis, we could just as easily look back sadly at the years of safe, cheap, and reliable tap water as a golden age when, for a little while, we could just turn on the tap and drink as much as we can. _______ 1.  Programs for recycling plastic bottles have not been successful because bottled water companies have tried hard to prevent them. _______ 2.  The bottled water industry has problems, but it is governments, not bottled water, that should be blamed for global water problems. _______ 3.  It is necessary to deal with water crisis so that drinkable tap water will be in continuous, abundant supply. _______ 4.  Bottled water is an issue made complicated by its political, environmental, economic and psychological impact. _______ 5.  People around the world consume bottled water four times the amount consumed in the US. _______ 6.  When we choose bottled water, we actually have neglected the fact that people in poor countries have no access to safe and clean water for survival. _______ 7.  The advertisements used by bottled water companies have the purpose of causing fear of contaminated tap water in people who then have to choose their product. _______ 8.  Bottled water is, in fact, an issue of water access and disease prevention for children in many countries. _______ 9.  The bottled water companies defend themselves by arguing that they are trying to solve problems in the water system. _______ 10.  News stories and advertisements have a strong influence on our choice of bottled water over tap water.