Keillor calls it quits...with plastic.

[From Garrison Keillor's weekly column on Salon.com]


Sep. 26, 2007 | I am sorry, Evian and San Pellegrino and Dasani and all the other bottled waters out there -- Aqua Velva, Wells Fargo, Muddy Waters, Joan Rivers, Jerry Springer, whatever -- but the current campaign against paying good money for bottled water when tap water is perfectly good (and very likely purer) is so sensible on the face of it that I am now done with you. Fini. Kaput. Ausgeschlossen. No more designer water. Water is water. If you want lemon flavoring, add a slice of lemon. You want bubbles, stick a straw in it and blow.

My father, a true conservative, would have smiled on this. All his life he resisted the attempts of big corporations to gouge him by selling him stuff he didn't need and so he was not a consumer of high-priced water, any more than he would've purchased bottles of French air or Italian soil. No, San Pellegrino and Perrier got rich off the pretensions of liberal wastrels like moi who thought it set us apart from the unlettered masses. We ordered it in restaurants for the same reason we read books we don't like and go to operas we don't understand -- we say to the waiter, "Perrier," to give a continental touch to our macaroni and cheese.

Enough. Man is capable of reform once presented with the facts, and the fact is that bottling water and shipping it is a big waste of fuel, so stop already. The water that comes to your house through a pipe is good enough, and maybe better.

So now I wonder, "What else am I doing that is too dumb for words?" A woman leaned over to me the other night and said, "You'd look so much better with your eyebrows trimmed." This is just the sort of advice a man yearns for -- you don't want to be walking around with eyebrows the size of sparrows for the rest of your life. Thanks for the tip, doll. What else? Maybe there are words I mispronounce, like "harbinger" or "inchoate." I'd be happy to be set straight.

I was in Berkeley, Calif., the other day and drove past a Lutheran church and then a Baptist: Perhaps some stereotypes have leaks in them. And when I was in Berkeley, a man told me in as kind a way as possible that my grasp of economics is fragile and I should not write about it in this column. Probably right.

I knew a boy in the fourth grade who insisted that it was the Chinese who had bombed Pearl Harbor, though fourth grade is sort of late to be thinking such a thing, and when our teacher showed him pictures in a book that pinned the infamous deed on the Japanese, he was sort of relieved to be able to give up his idea and not have people yell at him, "You're crazy." He reformed.

I gave up watching television 25 years ago because I liked it so much even though I couldn't remember what I had watched the day before and could see that if I went on as a viewer my life would become a blank. And now I refuse the iPod because it is an audio bubble that shuts you off from the world, which is where good ideas come from.

Reform feels good, take it from me. To correct course and avoid the reef and find clear sailing is the great tonic of life. A man grows a beard for the pleasure of cutting it off. And now I have the pleasure of boycotting bottled water for tap.

There is much we do not understand -- power cords in the briefcase, for example: You set them in neatly and a few hours later they are completely entangled with each other, and who knows why? -- but the stupidity of buying bottled water in America is easily grasped by even the dullest.

Thirsting for plastic.

Water is expensive.

This according to a New York Times column (Aug. 1, 2007) that pointed out if you got your eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend $1,400 every year. Compare that with the $0.49 it would cost from plain old tap water.

Consider this: all that plastic costs barrels of oil. All those bottles cost money and CO2 to ship cross-country. Only 23 percent of bottles are recycled, and states like Michigan don't offer a deposit as an incentive.

Recycling Jackson has reported on the thirst (pun intended) for recyclable plastics: companies can't collect enough used plastic bottles, even though the demand is high. Companies are willing to pay decent money for someone's used Aquafina (which is tap water anyway) bottle.

Plastic bags, however, are a totally different story. They're a pain in the ass, according to a Salon.com story about the difficulties of recycling the jelly-fish like bags:

"Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil," writes Katharine Mieszkowski.

Only one percent of those are recycled.

Some have said plastic is better than paper, but you can't grow more oil like you can more trees. "The only salient answer to paper or plastic is neither," says the article.

When I attended a Mariner's game during a recent Seattle, WA trip, I noticed that everywhere I looked there were bins for recycling plastic pop, juice, water, and - yes - beer bottles. And when the game was over (they lost to Texas by one point), the announcer even reminded the audience about the recycling bins.

What do Seattle Mariner fans know that we don't?

I'll admit: I'm a fan of bottled water. It tastes good, it's portable, and I can make a health and wellness justification when I bypass the sugared soda pop for a liter of the clear stuff.

But paying $1 or more for a bottle of the same stuff I flush in my toilet seems absurd, doesn't it? This is the same stuff I use to clean my dishes, wash my car, and brush my teeth. And it's still the safest and cleanest in the world. Some parched countries in the Sahara would give a lot for a teaspoon full of what I watch go down the drain every morning.

So recently I've started drinking plain tap water. And you know what? It's not that bad. I add a few drops of lemon juice if I don't like the taste, plop in a few ice cubes, and away I go. I'm not any less satisfied. My thirst is just as quenched, and I didn't contribute any more plastic molecules that will be around longer than the cockroach.

The critique is two-fold, involving both the use and waste of plastics and the mania behind obtaining fresh water from somewhere besides the garden hose. The more you think about it the more ridiculous it seems.

All that craziness has me thirsty. Time to grab a glass of cool, clear...

Well, you know the rest.

[by Dave Lawrence]

Welcome to Recycling Jackson!

We appreciate you stopping by the Recycling Jackson Reporter - electronic edition!

I'll have to think of a catchier title than that, but it'll do for now.

In the meantime, while we get things set up around here, be sure to stop by our Fall E-Waste Drive on Saturday, Oct. 13. Sam's Club has been nice enough to provide the location and some peoplepower - thanks Sam's!

Any questions, drop us a line at recyclingjackson@yahoo.com - and our apologies if it takes some time for a response.

Stay Green!
Dave Lawrence