Single use plastic

  

The drinking water here in the Valley comes from the Rio Grande.  We love the river, but not the taste of it.  It's hard to drink.  It's not like good Colorado water so we drink bottled water.  We love our Dasani bottled water.  I drink 3 or 4 bottles a day, and Judy drinks a bottle or two as well.  That's way too many plastic bottles to be returning to the planet.  Even if we recycle them, we have no assurance that they're really being recycled and not sent somewhere else to ultimately just be dumped in the ocean.

 

We've looked at alternatives.  Remember the Deep Rock water machines?  We had one in our kitchen in Colorado for many years.  There is no Deep Rock water delivery service here though, and those big five-gallon bottles would be a lot heavier to manage now than they used to be.  There are water-vending machines in town, but that would require wrangling the heavy bottles and extra trips to town to replenish them.  That doesn't seem like a great solution.

 

I'm so used to the Dasani bottles that I prefer drinking out of them.  They're so convenient, they fit in my back pockets just right every time I leave the house.  Hat, sunglasses, water bottles, ready.  No hike ever starts with less than two bottles of water.  We've tried reusable bottles, but they just aren't the same.  Metal doesn't work.  Other kinds of bottles, I can taste the plastic, or they're the wrong size and don't carry so easily.  

 

So here is our solution.  RO.  We got a reverse osmosis filter combination installed under our sink.  It's five stages.  The size is just right.

 

 

The RO removes all the dissolved metals from the water; so much so in fact that the water ends up tasting bland.  One more solution; a remineralizer cartridge.  It's the last thing in the sequence and puts just a touch of sodium and potassium back in.  The taste comes out just right; exactly, in fact, like Dasani.  And, we still get to drink out of Dasani bottles.  They refill from the little spigot on the sink.

 

I know reverse osmosis uses more water than just getting a glass out of the tap, but this is an efficient system that only uses 2 to 1.  That's not any worse than letting the water run clear and cool before you fill up your drinking glass.

 

We're led to believe that Dasani bottles aren't meant for extended reuse; the plastic degrades over time; so we put five Dasani bottles in the fridge, reuse and refill them for a month, then at the beginning of the next month, recycle all the old ones and get out another five fresh Dasani bottles.  5 single-use bottles a month instead of 150.  Brilliant!