FACT:  Americans spent over $15 billion on bottled water last year.  That's 50 billion plastic bottles being produced from fossil fuels, shipped full across the country or world, and mostly discarded in landfill.

FACT:  In Fiji, from whence come 1 million bottles daily of the grooviest bottled water EVER, half of the population has no safe drinking water.  Hence the periodic typhoid outbreaks.

FACT:  Fiji water, touted as coming from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth", requires a bottling plant that runs 24 hours a day on 3 large diesel generators.  So much for pristine.  Sorry, Fiji, but there might be traces of chlorine in our tap water.  (I won't EVEN go into what those plastic bottles are putting into our bottled water.)

FACT:  Our tap water is among the safest in the world, and is often what we're drinking in those bottles (about 1/4 of 'em).

FACT:  1000-3000 children die daily from tainted drinking water.  In 2000, 10 million died of malnutrition, according to Lancet.

FACT:  $15 billion could provide solar panels to power 2.5 million homes a year, buy 750 million electric cars, or pay the salaries of half a million public school teachers.

FACT:  The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that, for $30 billion a year, agricultural systems could be set up to end world hunger.

How did we get so damned self-absorbed?  May I suggest that, instead of buying more bottled water, we all refill a few of the 50 billion bottles floating around, put them in the fridge, and put the money we would have spent into a mayonnaise jar on the kitchen counter to send to Oxfam or Heifer International?  

This is the shame of our nation.