Breda O'Brien“Making enough plastic to satisfy the US water market takes 17 million barrels of oil”, writes Breda O’Brien
Blame Michael Senatore, a 18-year-old student from North Carolina. He started the bottle flipping craze with a video that has now been viewed six million times. At a school talent show, he hams it up by entering to the kind of stirring music that normally accompanies the finale of a blockbuster film, pauses, then flips a bottle so that it lands upright on the table. The school audience erupts in wild applause, as if he had just demonstrated some amazing skill.
In fact, bottle flipping is very hard to do. There are all sorts of blogs offering advice about how to flip a bottle successfully, including how far to fill it and the correct flick of the wrist. And naturally, now the challenge is to land the bottle on its cap, or to perform other tricks like flipping it through a basketball hoop.
Crazes are nothing new. Some of us have lived through everything from hula hoops to Tamagotchi, those irritating virtual pets that died all too easily through neglect. Then there was this year’s Pokemon Go, which at its height had 45 million users tracking virtual Pokemon everywhere they went.
Harmless
The bottle-flipping craze appears harmless enough, unless you count frayed parental and teacher nerves.
Some schools have banned it, though, because bottles crashing through the air constantly are so disruptive.
Some US parents have reported students spending up to $20 a week on bottled water, only to pour two thirds of it straight down the sink in order to practise.
Now, that is something to be concerned about. But in fact, the real problem may not be water bottle flipping, but single-use water bottles.
Ireland, with some notable exceptions in counties where ‘boil water’ notices are as common as rainfall, has a very good public water supply.
Why, then, as Conor Pope pointed out in The Irish Times, do we spend spent more than €76.5 million a year on bottled water – that is about €15.30 per head? According to Repak, the amount of plastic bottles that end up in landfill every year would stretch around Ireland 2,000 times. Of course, they are not all single use water bottles and include everything from shampoo to tomato ketchup, but the figures are stark, nonetheless.
A plastic bottle can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade, and every tonne of plastic that is recycled saves the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes of carbon being released into the atmosphere. Making enough plastic to satisfy the US water market takes 17 million barrels of oil – enough fuel to keep half of Ireland’s two million cars motoring for a year.
The idea that everyone would be toting around bottles of water rather than drinking water from the tap would have seemed ludicrous mere decades ago.
However, it is a classic example of marketing. Create doubt about a current product, present an apparently better alternative and pretty soon, everyone is buying it.
Fashionable sparkling waters are marketed practically as health foods, but undergo significant processing. Even naturally carbonated waters like Perrier have the carbon dioxide extracted first, then recombined with the purified water.
Packaging, storage and transportation costs mean that bottled water is about 2,000 times more expensive than water from a tap.
Pope Francis mentions the word ‘water’ 47 times in Laudato Si’, because clean drinking water is so central to human life.
According to the UN, more than 2.8 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. Water is a finite resource – the same water has been circulating through the water cycle since the time of the dinosaurs.
Pope Francis wants us to conserve water and to ensure that it is fairly distributed. In Ireland, we have had endless battles about paying for water but it is a battle replete with ironies, not least because water pricing, which was meant to aid conservation, ended up with no hope of achieving any such thing.
Safe, public water has to be paid for in some way, and successive governments made a hash of linking costs to responsible usage.
It gets even more complicated. We don’t just drink water, we also eat and wear it. For example, it takes 15,400 litres of water to produce a kilo of steak, when you factor in fertiliser, farm machinery and feed, not to mention processing and transport.
It is very easy to become overwhelmed by the problems that the world faces regarding the environment, but it is more important to take small steps than to do nothing at all.
For example, instead of flipping a single-use water bottle, how about ditching them entirely?
A reusable drinking container that can be sterilised may be an initial expense, but over years of use, the cost to yourself and the planet will be much lower. Let’s sell our kids on that craze, instead.