New Jersey
Nov. 20th, 2007 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleI was in New Jersey for a few hours this morning, for a job interview. I took the train from New York, and spent about 3 hours at the plant talking to various people and filling out forms. Then I walked back to the little commuter rail station and took various trains back to Redbird's place in New York. There was an inefficient connection, where I was stuck at an outdoor train station in Dover, NJ for almost an hour (well, there was an indoor part of the station, but they keep it locked in midafternoon so there was no way to get warm or use a restroom without searching through the entire downtown for friendly businesses. Which I didn't.) I read the NJ Star Ledger, which I had picked up on the train. I had _Slow River_ in my briefcase, and dozens of ebooks, so I'm not quite sure why I picked up the newspaper. I was probably thinking vaguely about checking out the area, in case I might be moving to New Jersey for a job in the forseeable future.
One of the editorials (not a true editorial--it was an opinion piece with a byline, though I don't remember the columnist's name) was advocating for the bottled water industry. I was surprised by how vehement the column was, by the defensiveness of the tone. The columnist wasn't just saying he or she liked bottled water and wanted to use it. It was more along the lines of, "How dare anyone try to discourage decent people from using clean, safe, convenient bottled water!" As you probably know, there are environmental and economic arguments in favor of drinking tap water (or locally filtered water) instead of paying the bottled-water people to ship water all over the place. The columnist argued that bottled water really is different, as the bottlers advertise, and it's well worth paying for the advantages of taste, convenience, consistency, etc. My favorite argument was the one about there being no point in reducing fuel wasted on moving bottled water around, because 99.9% of US oil is used for other purposes. A person could justify almost anything that way.
In the same newspaper, on the health/science page, there was an article on water bottles. It warned about carcinogens leaching into drinking water when people were reckless enough to re-use water bottles. (I don't think they quantified anything.) They started with the dangers of lexan, and went on to say commercial polyethylene bottles sold full of water or soda were safe to use once, but would leach carcinogens if a person refilled them with water. There was no mention of any kind of safe re-usable container, or any suggestion that re-using or recycling containers might be a good idea.
I wondered if the bottled water industry buys a lot of advertising space from the newspaper, or if there is a connection along those lines? Or if NJ has really foul tap water, such that any sensible person sees an obvious need for safe, tasty bottled water? All I drank on this visit was part of a bottle of Coke, and that came from New York.
One of the editorials (not a true editorial--it was an opinion piece with a byline, though I don't remember the columnist's name) was advocating for the bottled water industry. I was surprised by how vehement the column was, by the defensiveness of the tone. The columnist wasn't just saying he or she liked bottled water and wanted to use it. It was more along the lines of, "How dare anyone try to discourage decent people from using clean, safe, convenient bottled water!" As you probably know, there are environmental and economic arguments in favor of drinking tap water (or locally filtered water) instead of paying the bottled-water people to ship water all over the place. The columnist argued that bottled water really is different, as the bottlers advertise, and it's well worth paying for the advantages of taste, convenience, consistency, etc. My favorite argument was the one about there being no point in reducing fuel wasted on moving bottled water around, because 99.9% of US oil is used for other purposes. A person could justify almost anything that way.
In the same newspaper, on the health/science page, there was an article on water bottles. It warned about carcinogens leaching into drinking water when people were reckless enough to re-use water bottles. (I don't think they quantified anything.) They started with the dangers of lexan, and went on to say commercial polyethylene bottles sold full of water or soda were safe to use once, but would leach carcinogens if a person refilled them with water. There was no mention of any kind of safe re-usable container, or any suggestion that re-using or recycling containers might be a good idea.
I wondered if the bottled water industry buys a lot of advertising space from the newspaper, or if there is a connection along those lines? Or if NJ has really foul tap water, such that any sensible person sees an obvious need for safe, tasty bottled water? All I drank on this visit was part of a bottle of Coke, and that came from New York.
