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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Green Bullshit Alert! Coke's Hippie-Friendly Bottled Water.

Posted by Sarah Mirk on Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 11:40 AM

I just flew back and forth across the country and every time I asked for water, the flight attendants handed me one of these bright two-gulp bottles:

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The peppy branding made me cringe a little, so I turned over the bottle and read this little statement on the back:

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Uh, what? This bottled water company wants me to stand dripping and cold in the shower so that there's still enough water in the world to be drained into millions of totally unsustainable 8.5 ounce plastic bottles? Who would be so cheeky?

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Oh geez. What a bizarro green-hungry market we live in these days. Coca Cola is preaching to me about how my showers are wasteful while it's meanwhile trying to get itself out of hot water with environmentalists who criticize their overuse of the world's finite water supply. While Coke is ambitiously aiming to be "water neutral" by 2012, they still extract 1.73 liters of fresh water for every liter of soda they produce. Thanks for putting your eco-friendly tips on the side of a bottle of water distributed on jet planes, Coke!

 

Comments (6) RSS

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1
Nice work, SMirk.
Posted by a.O on August 6, 2009 at 12:08 PM · Report
2
Does your dislike of the messenger invalidate the message? Because if that's the case, I can safely ignore everything written by the The New Republic and Fox News.

Even when they're correct, just cuz... you know... they did that one thing one time I didn't like.
Posted by Graham on August 6, 2009 at 12:10 PM · Report
3
Okay, are there any shower heads that use 10 gallons/minute? ("20-40 gallons in a 4 minute shower") If you took a 6 minute shower with that shower head you'd empty most hot water heaters, and if you took a 12 minute shower you'd empty the biggest hot water heater they put in houses. And given that I know plenty of people that take 20 minute showers that have shower heads that were made in the 70s, I have a hard time imagining that they do it even though the last 8 minutes of it are cold. 10 gallons/minute is a lot of water, it is closer to what you get out of a garden house without a nozzle on it.

Even the worst shower heads don't put out more than 5 gallons/minute, typical, even for a bad one is more like 3, (with low flow going down to around 1.)
Posted by Matthew D on August 6, 2009 at 12:26 PM · Report
4
I wonder if "hey, don't put your tap water in tiny plastic bottles, hire a marketing team to design trite little labels for it, and then ship it around the country in big ass semi trucks. That's pretty wasteful dude!" was ever on the fun fact ideas board.
Posted by atomic on August 6, 2009 at 2:18 PM · Report
5
like this post for a different reason....those bottles have been kicking around my home and I couldn't figure out how they got there. Must have been from the family vacation, and plane flight. Everytime I looked at one I thought "Which of my boys went to an amusement park where they handed out their own brand of water?" Mystery solved.
Posted by Jules Pieri on August 8, 2009 at 4:31 AM · Report
6
Excellent post, Sarah.
Posted by Troll Hammer! on August 21, 2009 at 10:50 AM · Report

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