Bye-Bye Bottled Water

The following video is from our friends at ViroPOP. Head over to their website for more great clips with host Jessica Williamson.

$268 bottle of water, anyone? Going once… going twice….

Just as growth in the US bottled water market is finally dropping off, Greenland has made the bewildering move to bottle and export 1 to 3,000 year old water that it will drill from icebergs. To add insult to environmental injury, Greenland will market its product as “sustainable.” Just how much marketing sense went into the idea to bottle the climate-induced melt from Greenland’s glaciers in plastic and ship it with a heavy carbon footprint stamped firmly into each “sustainable” bottle is anyone’s guess.

Then again, given half a chance at a new export market, Greenland’s Nordic decendants have historically made ill-advised decisions when it comes to managing their extremely fragile natural resources. As Jared Diamond describes in Collapse, the first European Greenland settlers hunted polar bears and walruses for the pelts and tusks to export to Europe without eating the animal’s meat. Stubbornly relying on mal-adapted cattle instead, the struggling population overgrazed what little pasture land was available, exhausted their resources, and eventually starved when their export market (and the climate) changed.

Greenland’s bottled water may not fetch as much as the $268 “designer” bottled water Jessica Williamson describes in this video. But even if it achieves the average cost for bottled water (a mere 1000 times more expensive than tap water) and maintains the same lack of added health benefits, will anyone want to drink it?