Reusable Water Bottles Options: Revisited By Slate.com
By Jenn (TinyChoices.com) | September 27, 2007
Here’s a Slate.com take on reusable water bottle options. While the author reviewed many of the same bottles that I covered in my previous post, she does cover a few new ones, and her ideal bottle turns out to be different than mine. Which drives home her point: “…there is no one water bottle for all seasons, or all peoples.” True dat.
Topics: Food, Waste | 7 Comments »
Like many of the tiny choosers on this blog, I can’t justify bottled water when we have access to potable tap water. I’ve felt equally unjustified in buying bottled water when i’ve traveled to places without universal access to potable drinking water. I didn’t want to support an industry that wastes more water than it bottles and i’d be generating waste in a place where i couldn’t recycle/downcycle it. Still a girl’s gotta drink right? When I was in Rwanda a couple of years ago, I would drink water that was boiled or I would order hot tea, sans the tea. I’d transfer this to the nalgene I was carrying at the time. Heat and Nalgene probably wasn’t a good idea, but i’m not sure what would have been better. With some of the metal bottles, the heat is transfered to the outside and it is too hot to touch. I guess a thermos type bottle would have been best for this operation, but I didn’t need to keep the water hot either. thoughts?
Seems like you covered all of the options! Hot water into a Nalgene is an effective solution, but certainly not ideal… an insulated thermos-type container would have been perfect (next time you go to Rwanda!). The most efficient solution might be personal filtration systems, of the type used for wilderness travel– the higher-end systems work incredibly well, though there may be location-specific bugs they’re not capable of handling, so definitley do research on this. But that way you’d avoid the disposable bottles, the having to boil/transfer all drinking water, and the having to contain hot water.
I’ve been trying not to seriously consider purchasing the platypus bottle ever since I read this article about a lightweight lifestyle (including eco!) by andrew skurka, lightweight/long-distance backpacker extraordinaire.
Well I LOVE the water-bladder systems for outdoor activities– it totally revolutionizes hiking for me, to be able to sip as I strut up a mountain. Really, I didn’t think it would be as great as it turned out to be. But for everyday use, while I LOVE the idea of the lightweight/packable design (cause really, sometimes my SIGG is just too heavy!) I’m not sure I want to go back to drinking from plastic (albeit one they say is leach-free). What do you think about that issue?
I don’t know! I mean, plastic is not good. there’s a time and a place for it, but if I can avoid it I want to avoid it! the thing that I love about the platypus is that you can roll it up and carry it in a smaller bag – which I would love. of course, i don’t *really* need a smaller solution, b/c my smallest bags wouldn’t hold the platypus anyway, and my sigg fits into my medium bags.
but you know me, I love gadgets!
thanks jenn.
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