Is there a place for Boxed Water?
By Karina | March 23, 2009
I was talking to my mom a few months back, and she asked me what was better – to buy her OJ in a plastic bottle, or in a carton. Now, I know that in general, these cartons fall into the tea bag wrapper trap that we’ve found in the past – it’s paper (highly recyclable!) encased in plastic (not so recyclable!) which renders the whole thing pretty darn UNrecyclable. On the other hand, my personal feelings on plastic is that every piece of plastic that is used and disposed of incorrectly is like pouring gasoline on the ground – it’s simplistic, yes. But plastic is made from oil, and there are so many more things we should be doing with oil instead of making shrink wrap and mylar bags for tea (um, like making medical supplies, or conserving energy for when we really need it later. So I advised my mom to buy cartons, because 1. it’s not as much plastic and 2. they flatten out when you throw them away, even if they aren’t recyclable everywhere.
After Jenn tweeted about the new (arguably cute) boxed water and if it was necessary, I started thinking more about this carton thing. I took a look at the boxed water environmental page, and while our first impulse definately is to assume it’s greenwashing because, well, tap water is always best! I think that maybe there is a real market for this boxed water situation. I don’t think we should go out and all start buying cartoned water – no, we should continue to use our awesome and trendy cute reusable water bottles. But this really made me refine my thinking a little:
The creation and distribution of our box has a significantly lower carbon footprint compared to plastic bottles, up to 80% lower in some cases.
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Our carbon footprint is dramatically lower as our boxes are shipped flat to our filler and filled only as demand is created, opposed to most bottled water companies that ship their empty bottles across the globe to be filled, then shipped back for consumption. The flat, unfilled boxes we can fit on 2 pallets, or roughly 5% of a truckload, would require about 5 truckloads for empty plastic or glass bottles.
Of course! these cartons, while not a substitute for our awesome clean tap water, is probably really useful and innovative in humanitarian situations, or even in outdoor rock’n'roll concert situations where bottled water is necessary. How about those towns in the southeast that have a tendency to run out of water during the extensive drought that has been going on?
I was also really excited to find a redirect to the carton council recycling page, where you can look up (by state) if your municipality accepts flattened cartons for recycling. This is invaluable information that is often hard to find – I didn’t know where to look for it when I talked to my mom earlier!
How do you feel about cartoned water? greenwash, or innovation?
Topics: Waste | 5 Comments »
sooo… this gets me thinking about milk. We usually buy milk in a plastic bottle, because we do recycle it. We cannot recycle the cartons. (Not accepted in our curbside pickup, and no dropoff locations listed.) The transportation issue is clearly a big one. So, is it better to purchase our milk in a recyclable plastic container or a non-recyclable carton? I have no idea how to go about finding out…
[...] Tiny Choices has an excellent post about boxed water. [...]
I’m pretty much against packaged water for anything except emergencies or situations where clean tap water is just not available. The environmental impact of packaged water (I’m using that term instead of bottled, since we’re not talking about bottles here) is about much more than the bottle or box. It’s about the environmental impact of extracting all that water from one place and shipping it to another. Which you know!
The key is reversing the brainwashing that’s been perpetrated by the bottled water industry to convince us that our tap water is no good!
[...] Is there a place for Boxed Water? [...]
[...] and how important it is, and what, actually, we should be drinking out of. We’ve talked about putting water in boxes, selling municipal water in bottles, and reasons NOT to drink bottled water. We’ve discussed [...]