I’m just going to say it: Bottled water is a huge waste of money. I’ve heard every argument in the book for drinking it, and I’ve yet to be convinced that it makes any sense for a person living in America to drink it. I’m so fervent in my belief that I made a short video about it:

Although the video is pretty hokey and meant to be light-hearted, I made a great effort to fill it with actual facts about bottled water and tap water (my sources are listed at the end of this post). 24% of bottled water is just repackaged tap water, and the brands that actually come from a spring or a glacier or… whatever? They give you no guarantee of cleanliness or safety, since they’re so loosely regulated.

And the cost difference is just ridiculous. In a 1999 report on bottled water, the National Resources Defense Council found that:

A five-year supply of bottled water at the recommended intake of eight glasses a day can cost more than $1,000. An equivalent amount of tap water costs about $1.65.

My campus sells Aquafina at $1.50 for 20 ounces. That’s $9.60 a gallon, compared to just $0.002 for a gallon of tap water! And according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, the average American drank 29 gallons of bottled water in 2007. That’s $278.40! And how much would that much tap water cost you? Just under 6 cents. Seriously.

Bottled water certainly has a place in this world. There are 1 billion people in this world that do not have access to a reliable source of drinking water. But those aren’t the people that are getting bottled water. For Americans who have highly regulated public water readily available, bottled water is simply a choice.

And it should be an easy choice to make. Even if you went out and bought a nice $20-$30 stainless steel or aluminum water bottle to fill up every day, you’d come out way ahead of paying for bottled water. In addition to fattening up your wallet, you’d make a huge environmental impact, as well.

Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year, 167 for each person. Durable, lightweight containers manufactured just to be discarded. Water bottles are made of totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, so we share responsibility for their impact: Our recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year–more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

– (Fast Company.com article, emphasis added)

The evidence against bottled water piles up as high as the empty bottles in the landfill: drinking bottled water when tap water is readily available doesn’t make any sense, no matter how you look at it.

The video in this post was made as an entry for the Take Back the Tap video scholarship contest. And now, it’s made me a finalist! The video was a lot of fun to make, and yes… I make a cameo at the end!

Sources:
“Take Back the Tap” by Food & Water Watch
“Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?” by the National Resources Defense Council
“Message in a Bottle” by Charles Fishman on FastCompany.com
“Bottled Water’s Success Story Continues” by the Beverage Marketing Corporation

Here’s a tip:

Don’t trust your printer when it tries to tell you that you’re nearly out of ink. Especially if your printer is an HP psc 1210 All-In-One!

Mine told me back in September that I was nearly out of black ink, so I ran out and got a new print cartridge for it. Since I print a lot for both school and work, I knew I couldn’t afford to run out of ink. But I decided not to change the cartridge until I could see a noticeable drop in quality.

I’m still waiting, 6 months later, for that print quality to drop. And if you average out my printing, I probably print one page a day (yes, black – I rarely print color, I haven’t replaced the color cartridge in two years!). So that means that my printer can churn out over 180 pages on a “nearly empty” cartridge. (And counting!)

Moral of the story: the little warning icon might be a good indicator of when you should buy a new cartridge, but you can probably squeeze out quite a bit before you actually need to change the cartridge.

Also, here’s an indication of my insanity – once I do change the cartridge, I’m going to make a spreadsheet to track exactly how many pages I can get out of a cartridge. Yep – I’m nuts!

Although, maybe not that nuts – there are a lot of people that track things like this. I seem to remember a website where people could enter in how many miles they got on their tank after the gas gauge hit E… one of you reading this wouldn’t happen to know the name of that site, would you?

Last week, I asked you guys whether I was being cheap or being frugal by putting off the purchase of a new power adapter for my laptop. I got a variety of answers, but a lot of common opinions kept popping up. Notably, several people told me that buying a new adapter would save me time, and thus make me more productive, which would save me/earn me more money.

No offense guys, but… WRONG.

Saving time does not save you money. Extra time on your hands only saves/earns you money if that time is well spent. I’m a huge procrastinator and a master at finding distractions, so five extra minutes in my day doesn’t mean five more minutes of work – it means five minutes of mindlessly checking Facebook.

That isn’t to say that saving time can’t save you money – just that it probably won’t. Unless you have some sort of productivity system in place, that extra time will just get lumped into the rest of your day, and you probably won’t see any difference at all.

The same goes for money. Frugality, without some sort of greater plan for your money, won’t get you very far. Sure, you might save $1.10 by going to this gas station instead of that one, but unless you have some idea of what to do with that extra $1.10, it doesn’t really matter. The more money people have, the more they tend to spend. Have you ever noticed that money problems tend to follow people, even if they get a raise or a higher-paying job?

Money doesn’t solve money problems, a change in behavior does. More time doesn’t solve time management problems… a change in behavior does. Once you have a plan for your time and money, then you can worry on trying to find more of each to accelerate that plan.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some quality procrastinating to do!

Today is Blog Action Day – the day when bloggers around the web, and around the world, are uniting to bring environmental issues to light. The following is my offering to this great movement.

I try not to be too heavy-handed with it, but sometimes it just comes through. I’m a tree hugger. Perhaps it’s a product of growing up in a small town, a rural community with vast amounts of nature to enjoy. Perhaps it comes from my parents, who instilled a love of camping and the outdoors in me from a young age. Or maybe Smokey the Bear really just got to me when I was young (only I can stop forest fires!).

However it came to be, I have dedicated a large portion of my time and energy to making sure that I live a life of conservation and environmental awareness. The beauty of all this is that it naturally saves me money. Attempting to use less resources, to reuse items that can be reused, and to recycle tends to be easier on the wallet. After all, if you use less, you buy less!

I do take this to somewhat of an extreme. I engage in a practice called Compacting. The basic principle of Compacting is that you make an agreement with yourself not to buy anything new, with the exception of food, health, and safety products. Everything else must be bought used, or gone without. From the Compacting blog:

1) to go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc. — a step, we hope, inherits the revolutionary impulse of the Mayflower Compact; 2) to reduce clutter and waste in our homes (as in trash Compact-er); 3) to simplify our lives (as in Calm-pact)

Compacting was largely started as an environmental movement, but it was quickly discovered that Compacting could save vast amounts of money. Since each Compacter makes the agreement with themselves, they decide how far they want to go with it. Some Compacters in cities have given up cars as part of their Compact, since gas and other maintenance items must be bought for them. This may not be possible for those of us living in areas where biking and public transportation are not possible.

In addition to the creed of not buying new, here are some other things I do to as part of my Compact:

• When buying food items, I strive to buy those with the least packaging.
• I attempt to drive my car only as often is as necessary, combining trips and staying on campus all day instead of driving home and back.
• Recycling as much as possible.
• Consuming media electronically whenever possible. This means reading newspapers and magazines online, as well as downloading songs from iTunes instead of buying CDs (not that I’ve actually had the money to buy songs lately!).
• Using Freecycle both as a way to find items I need, as well as a way to give away items I don’t (I gave a lot away during our recent move.
• Eliminating unneeded objects from my life, via Freecycle, donation, or garage sale (I’m still working on this – sometimes, it’s hard to let go).

You can see how these behaviors improve both my environmental impact and my bottom line. But I understand that many people aren’t prepared to sacrifice quite so much as I have. But anyone can take the ideas of the Compact and adapt it to their own life. These tips are not just for those of us who have dedicated ourselves to the cause. If everyone adopted just a few of the Compact principles, there would be a great force of change.

More information on the Compact can be found here:
The Compact Blog
SFGate Article on The Compact
The Compact Yahoo Group