When I was around twelve or thirteen my family took me to Acapulco in Mexico. While there we all got things that were hand-crafted in the region. My father got a typical Mexican machete, my mother got a typical Mexican blanket, and I got typical Mexican diarrhea.

Montezuma’s Revenge, they called it. Named after an Aztec ruler that was caught on the wrong end of a Spanish pike back when the Spanish were refining their reputation of being world-class oppressors. Without going into too many details about the illness itself (groans emitted from a toilet stall that could probably be heard in Brazil) it’s safe to say that something nasty got into my digestive system and turned my body into a 13-hour fire hose. Chances are it got in there because I ate a salad where the ingredients had been washed with local tap water. This was probably the case because we were careful; we never drank water out of the tap. We always drank bottled water, because that’s what you do in developing countries where the sanitation and sewage hasn’t much improved since Cortés– you drink bottled water.

What you don’t do is drink bottled water in places where the tap water is perfectly fine.

According to International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), bottled water in the US jumped 7%, to just over 30 gallons (113 litres) per person last year. This is a lone American filling a shopping cart with bottled water over the course of 2012. Which actually doesn’t sound that bad until you realize that the way the IBWA averaged it out, there are 300-million shopping carts, one for each American. Along these lines, the Associated Press recently lead with this onerous opener: “It wasn’t too long ago that America had a love affair with soda. Now, an old flame has the country’s heart.”

The “old flame”, which the AP is talking about, is water. Ignoring whether or not they realize that fire is the exact opposite of water, thereby literally extinguishing their own analogy, the article goes on to say that the average American drank 55 gallons (208 litres) of water last year. Combine that with the IBWA stats and you realize that around 60% of what’s being drunk is out of a plastic bottle. A bottle that eventually ends up being featured as part of a towering mountain of other water bottles in an Anti-Bottled Water documentary. If you haven’t seen the documentary, you’ve seen the pictures. Usually the mountain sits on the edge a cesspool of slime and shimmers from the smell-waves emanating off of it. Overhead, gulls float around in air the colour of piss, while children sit hunched on the mountain wearing nothing but flies.

Before you get too caught up in the “American imperial consumerist blah-blah-blahs”, according to worldwater.org, the US is ranked 12th in per capita bottled water drinking.The first — and still bearing the standard for making tourists from the global North feel uncomfortable in their bowels’ — is Mexico. The second, with half the population: Italy.

Keep in mind, this is per-person. We’re tossing notions of population – more heavily populated places drink more bottled water — out the window. Those numbers see the US as first and China second. And China, judging by recent news, we can understand. Their fresh water has been turned into pig-and-duck-carcass soup. Bottled water consumption based on population may, like China, show a necessity, whereas per capita, it shows people with too much time and money on their hands.

Either way, it’s the places with perfectly fine tap water I have a problem with. What, you might ask, is the problem with Italy’s tap water? Nothing. The only problem with Italy’s tap water is the Italians. The same could be said for Belgium, Germany, France and Spain (4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, respectively). Actually, generally speaking, Europe is ranked number one as a region for bottled water consumption, with North America and Asia coming in place and show positions. Okay, this trifecta is from 2004 data, but the industry is giddily expecting a 27% increase heading towards 2015.

What we have here is the biggest PR dupe since advertisers set out to convince people that cigarettes were healthy back in the 20s. Basically the same narrative too: Touted as the healthy choice while having it fondled by celebrities. This is the bottled water industry selling people their own tap water back to them at a premium based on the design of the plastic it’s in. Court cases in which companies like Coca-Cola, Tesco, Adsa and Aquafina were shown to have tricked wonks into drinking water available from their own faucets would be comical if the repercussions weren’t so dreadful.

Time to get back to the numbers. Taking the European figures ­— where the tap water is clean. I know, because I’ve been drunk in many European places and have had to guzzle their tap water to re-hydrate, and I’ve been fine — the average person drinks about 111 litres of bottled water a year. And, because single litre bottles are not fashionable enough due to the sensibilities of the modern moron, we calculate by the half-litre and get 222 actual plastic bottles (granted, most plastic water bottles are smaller — 330 ml — but those numbers are too ridiculous to bear mentioning) being thrown away annually. Multiply that by the number of Europeans (739-million, give or take 10-million) and you have… Well, the grounds to shove that half-litre bottle up the place where Montezuma carries out his revenge strategy.

Harsh talk, no doubt. But I’m pretty sure all life on earth, aside from humans, would agree with me on this. The human body, after all, has remarkable enzymes for breaking down the un-biodegradable. Unlike the earth, which needs from about 450 years to forever.

There is reams, and reams, and reams, and reams of evidence that, not only is tap water in developed countries fine, it’s even better for you than bottled water. Largely because bottled water is unregulated in many places. The evidence of unregulated malfeasance is rampant in most industries: A lack of regulation in the financial industry is what caused the credit crisis. A lack of regulation in the street-drug industry is what caused dubstep. Nasty chemicals that mimic estrogen leach from the plastic into the water it contains, giving men breasts and women breast cancer. This is lazy information to come by, all you need is a reliable and ubiquitous internet connection to find this out. And chances are, if you have a reliable and ubiquitous internet connection you have clean tap water, and therefore no excuse. And even if you’ve just had a lobotomy and believe sincerely that bottled water is better for you — sure it may better for you, but you’re not the only person that lives here, you self-centered douche.

http://emajmagazine.com/2013/05/08/your-bottled-water-where-the-sun-dont-shine/