I arrived at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead this afternoon to visit my friend Richard. He had asked me to get him a copy of the Daily Mirror so I called into the Amigo shop on level 2 of the hospital (in the super-swanky extension built by the Coalition) and bought the required publication. At the till I was offered an unmissable opportunity to buy a bottle of water at a greatly reduced price, thus "saving" me lots of money. Spending money on a completely unnecessary item does not strike me as a way to "save" money. Moving on from the adaptation of our language so that it means the opposite of what is said, why on earth would I want to buy water in a bottle when we can get top quality water for nowt from a tap?
Furthermore, bottled water comes with an obscene cost to the environment. Huge resources are put into the single-use plastic bottles and vast amounts of fuel are used to move, unnecessarily, this enormous tonnage of water around the country (and often around the globe). Then, large resources are used to collect the waste bottles and dispose of them, though lots of them escape into the environment causing untold damage to ecological systems, all so that people can drink something from a bottle that is already freely available from a tap (or if you are on a meter very cheaply available).
No wonder the health of planet Earth is in such a poor state.
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