Water, water everywhere, but not to drink (unless it’s bottled)

Water, water everywhere, but not to drink (unless it’s bottled)

Columns

By: Bernie O'Neill

Remember how when you used to be thirsty out at some public venue, you got your drink of water from a public fountain?

I was thinking about that after visiting a new library. There’s a water fountain that is controlled by a sensor. Just touch the pad and it fires this perfect arc of water — you can lean down and get a drink and go back to your book search or studying or whatever, refreshed and without water all over the front of your shirt.

It’s a big change from water fountains of old that used to be sort of hit and miss. As in the water might hit your eye, but miss your mouth. It might graze your chin or go straight up your nose.

It might just sort of gurgle there, volcano like, not enough of a flow to really fire up into your mouth.  You’d have to decide how thirsty you were and how many public germs you were going to risk picking up by putting your mouth right on there.

Or it might come shooting out so fast it would wet the hair hanging over your forehead.

I mention drinking fountains in the wake of a report this week that says York Region’s water scored nearly perfect in 1,800 tests by the Ministry of the Environment.

Nearly perfect is pretty good.

What’s ironic is unless we are drinking water in our homes, many of us drink bottled water whenever we’re out and going around town, water that comes from any number of sources, including municipal water supplies from other towns and even provinces.

How did we get to this odd state of water consumption?

Some might say it’s ingenious marketing. The water bottling companies — and there are some big ones in on the game — have convinced us bottled water is safer.

Maybe it’s our lack of trust of municipalities and their workers after incidents such as Walkerton.

Or we’ve all become germophobes, even though I don’t see how water shooting upward in a drinking fountain could be contaminated — at least not any worse than water that sat in a plastic bottle for weeks on end and comes from a source that, well, I would just have to trust. Could be anywhere.

Or it’s just convenience — we buy a bottle whenever we want and pitch the bottle when we’re finished. Our throwaway society satisfies one of our basic needs: water.

Now a lot of people are wondering how we get out of this bad habit, that is leading to all kinds of unnecessary recycling of plastic bottles and is virtually polluting the landscape with bottles that don’t make it into the recycling stream.

We’re also trucking water all over the place and burning fuel when we could simply drink local tap water.

One method might be for municipalities to invest in upgrades to their existing public water fountains and build many more.

Maybe it’s just me, but my own little independent survey of late shows few fountains in public washrooms, hockey rinks, parks or near ball diamonds or soccer fields.  Which seems odd in a place such as Ontario, surrounded by the Great Lakes, with thousands of inland lakes and, based on the recent weather, where it rains everyday.

I read Minneapolis will spend $500,000 to put drinking fountains in areas of high foot and bicycle traffic to battle the bottle scourge. We could use a little of that here.

In the meantime, I think we have to start re-educating a generation raised on the water bottle.

My son was bugging me for money after one of his hockey games last year to buy water.

“Get a drink from the fountain,” I told him. “It’s free.”

He looked at me with his eyes open as if to say either, a) “What’s a fountain?” b) “You expect me to embarrass myself in front of others by drinking out of that thing? That’s for the great unwashed, not the upper crust like ourselves,” or c) (as turned out to be the case) “Dad, don’t you know, the fountain doesn’t work?”

Sure enough, the fountain did not work. Hadn’t worked all year.

Which didn’t seem to matter much because there was a big pop, water and sports drink dispensing machine right around the corner — $2 for each drink.

It’s kind of like the air for your tires — most gas stations now have a machine that charges 50 cents or even a dollar. For air. Shouldn’t water and air be free, as a customer service? Water, air. Soon they’ll be charging for sunshine.

(Ever try to get a glass of water in a restaurant? It’s a guaranteed way to get your server to wonder off and never return.)

If water fountains were replaced with the high-tech ones at the library I visited and a concerted effort was made by towns to put drinking fountains in parks, hockey rinks, subway stations and washrooms, we might finally ween ourselves off the water bottle.

All content contained in this or any other yorkregion.com website including but not limited to textual, audio, video and any graphics are copyright 2000-2008 Metroland Media Group Ltd. and can not be used in any part without expressed written permission, with the exception of content in the yorkregion.com Pen & Pixel section, which requires the written consent of the authors.