April 22, 2013

Ripley Hill Road resident Adriana Cohen explains why she’s in favor of repealing Concord’s bottled water bylaw at annual Town Meeting.

As New York City’s ban on the sale of large cups of soda and other sugary drinks at some businesses starts on Tuesday, one thing is clear: soda’s run as the nation’s beverage of choice has fizzled.

You may have seen the news on Facebook or heard the stories on NPR: Concord, Massachusetts, has banned bottled water, and certain “liberal” colleges in Vermont have banned it, too. Al Gore spent a lot of his media attention after the huge success of Inconvenient Truth blaming bottled water…

These drink cases are from a local convenience store.   There are three cases of all other kinds of flavored drinks compared to one case with water.  So why is the bottled water industry vilified?

Despite organized anti-bottled-water campaigns across the country and a noisy debate about bottled water’s environmental impact, Americans are buying more bottled water than ever.

In 2011, total bottled water sales in the U.S. hit 9.1 billion gallons — 29.2 gallons of bottled water per person, according to sales figures from Beverage Marketing Corp.

What do you call a person who lives in a 6,000 square-foot house and buys a third family car for his teenaged child, but wants to ban the sale of bottled water in order to save the planet?