Mayor Ken Livingstone of London is urging his citizens to forego bottled water in light of the drag it puts on the environment. Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York has done the same. Others, meanwhile, have taken the further step of an outright ban on bottled water. Your thoughts?
Bottled Water Is the Enemy
and 
. You can also watch it on 
It’s patently false that bottle water is better tested and safer than city water.
The government has no right to ban a product simply because it’s popular with people who don’t know enough about it.
However, the government DOES have the ability – and the duty – to levy taxes on products, according to many different variables. Smoking destroys the healthcare infrastructure by overloading it with preventable diseases. So they tax cigarettes. Heavily.
Tax the BOTTLE that the water comes in. That gives the manufacturer of the water an incentive to find a *different* material to store their product in. Make it $1 tax per bottle, and I guarantee that every one of those manufacturers will have a solution within a month.
I’ll bet they come up with refillable bottles, and retool their water distribution method. Stick yer $5 refillable Evian bottle into the machine, and for $0.25 the machine fills it up…
Then Evian can turn around and talk about how wonderful their new “green” distribution system is, and how they are working to improve the environment, and blah-de-blah-blah-blah.
The market will find the solution. NOT the government.
10 cent redemption charge to recycle. not that complicated, really.
@10
The market is clearly not finding a solution. The market is allowing this blatent extravagance to flourish. In fact, you’re suggestion for the market to find the solution comes only after the Government has imposed a tax….whose solution is that then?
Read your bottled water labels. Most of them contain water that came from a municipal supply anyway.
Bottled water is just the new trans-fat is just the new cigarettes.
More idiotic enviro-fascist lunacy. It does seem to bother these dolts that things like the London congestion charge are expensive and useless.
Then again…these twits are making it far easier to be rebellious. Be a rebel…drink bottled water.
Why stop at bottled water? Why not ban all bottled beverages – since beverages are almost completely composed of water, isn’t the environmental impact just as bad?