I imagine Flint, Michigan was good for the bottled water business.

I picked up a couple of bottles when I was walking with the friars last week, and I keep a case at home in the winter when freezing weather might lead to no electricity and, therefore, no water. Other than that I rarely drink bottled water. I'm glad it's there when I need it, but business like mine sure wouldn't keep them in business. I always thought it was crazy to buy water, but then we live in a place with great water. If I lived in Steubenville, OH, for instance, I might think differently.

AMDG

Right. That plastic thing gets to me though. How many hundreds of disposable pens and razors have I had over the past 10 years?

AMDG

But the vast quantities bought in the US are at best a funny thing and worst a big problem because of those zillions of plastic bottles.

Haven't lived anywhere without recycling in 25 years.

And that's only the stuff that people actually put into recycling bins. How much just gets thrown into the ordinary trash, or tossed into the street?

I guess the basic problem leading to those trash islands in the ocean is not the disposable nature of the containers as such so much as the street-tossers. There is a huge problem here with plastic and other trash going into the storm sewers and from there into streams, rivers, and Mobile Bay. Mountains of it. Obviously a large number of people just don't give a damn.

We have recycling here and I'm pretty careful about it. I always wonder if it really makes much difference, though.

All those plastic bags up in the trees.

Once I got some biodegradable diapers--obviously it's been a while--and when I saw what you had to do with them so that they would degrade (don't remember what know), I said, "Forget it." A lot of biodegradable stuff won't degrade in a landfill.

"biodegradable shipping peanuts"

Some people use popcorn, but I'm sure that must lead to a problem with rodents and insects. I'm wondering if anything truly biodegradable would have that problem.

AMDG

Biodegradable shipping peanuts are fun. When you get them wet they turn to mush and then dissolve completely. Into what I don't know. Presumably not a toxin.

On Government Blvd and a few other streets in Mobile one often sees strings of shiny plastic beads in the trees.

Erin, having to buy bottled water for all your drinking and I assume also cooking must run into significant expense, not to mention hassle. Lot of water to be toting from the grocery store.

Seems like bottled water in gallon or so sizes was available in grocery stores before it became such a popular thing.

And while we're at it, our (Americans') consumption of soft drinks always seems a bit odd to me, too. I like them occasionally but am puzzled by people who drink three or four a day. Seems like that would have to be bad for you. And then there are those enormous cups people buy at convenience stores.

Yes, I buy that, too (for my LP-cleaning gizmo). But here at least there's also non-distilled. Maybe that's a local thing. People clear it off the shelves in a few hours when there's a hurricane coming.

Obviously a large number of people just don't give a damn.

No, a small number of people don't give a damn. If a large number of people didn't, you'd be ankle deep in trash everywhere.

If I'm to judge by the places I've lived, the world is tidier than it was in 1970 and the air cleaner. My mother spent 7 years as a child in a rented house heated by coal in a furnace her father would stoke in the middle of the night. They never could kill off the rats. You didn't see much of them, but you could hear them scurrying up and down underneath the walls. By the standards of that day, my grandparents were living a congenial suburban life apposite for educated people such as themselves, though with debts leftover from the Depression they were paying off in increments.

My mother would tell you that her children had never known friendship as they had had it in that subdivision. Things get easier, and, in some ways harder.

And then there's the special water for two liters of which I just paid $4.50. It's called club soda.

I think there's less roadside litter here than there used to be. Air is definitely cleaner, because there is no longer a paper mill here. Air in Birmingham is definitely cleaner, because the steel industry is no more. These are the trade-offs of losing those industries.

"No, a small number of people don't give a damn."

Yeah, I guess you're right. And regarding the rest of what you said: also yeah, and this is what seems to me so difficult in assessing the whole income inequality, we're getting poorer question. There is most certainly less poverty, and less severe poverty, here in the South than when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s. One may ask whether dirt-poor in the country was really worse than somewhat less poor in a poverty-stricken and dangerous neighborhood in the city, but the material improvement is pretty hard to deny. In a lot of industrial areas there has been a falling-off since the '60s, but if you measure against any time before WWII how does it look?

And my mother says something similar about the human relationships in her small southern town in the '30s and '40s.

I meant coming out of the tap

Very sensible. I had considered making sport of the "stay hydrated" obsession along with the bottled water obsession but refrained. You're right, Grumpy, it is a kind of weird spiritual discipline.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I do not want to finish my Saints post for today.

AMDG

I've noticed that about drinking fountains, too, and wondered the same thing.

I laugh at the commercials that try to associate a particular brand of bottled water with youth or beauty or wealth. Or sex, like the commercials embedded in that article I linked to.

So I see. But St Gerard's final illness was surely not in 1955, was it?

Well, that's fixed. I'm so stupid. I should have just fixed it and said I didn't know what you were talking about.

AMDG

But other people wouldn't have, of course.

And besides, your eyes are really old.

AMDG

"All these people buying bottled water are religious and not spiritual if only they knew it."

Interesting!