Is there an element of germ phobia as well? Fear of using water fountains?
Oh, yes. An entire generation has grown up thinking that fountains equal filth, and the bottled water people are happy to exploit that. Some of the ads for water and even for water filters play on this, hyping this idea of public fountains being not quite pure. Bottled water has become so popular that in the last year, it’s experienced a backlash. It’s now a symbol of ecological sin. Why? In the beginning of 2007, Alice Waters declared that she would no longer sell bottled water. She took it off her menu. Then, many mayors across the country decided to stop spending taxpayer money on bottled water in city buildings. That gave the movement a bit of a push. The carbon footprint of the water bottle has really caught people’s imaginations — the amount of oil it takes to make all these plastic water bottles, and the amount of oil and energy it takes to transport the bottles to market, and to keep them cold, and then to haul them away again to landfills, since only 14 percent of them go bac
