The price we pay

Hardly a day goes by at the moment when someone in the office doesn't complain about the cost of petrol.

This is usually following by a hearty chorus of disaproval of the profiteering oil companies.

Today though someone made a very interesting point - it's still cheaper than bottled water!

As you can imagine, that got everyone's attention.

And it's true.

Thanks to marketing, we're happy to fork over two or three dollars for a 600ml bottle of water.

Which is probably double the cost of a litre of petrol.

Personally I don't have a problem with this, but I do worry about all those empty plastic bottles.

Bottled water sales in the US alone were around 12 million in 2006. That's a hell of a lot of bottles.

In fact, according to the Earth Policy Institute, you could run a million cars for a year with the oil required to make all those plastic bottles.

And according to green group Tappening, the money spent on bottled water in the US would be enough to cover every child in the country with health insurance.

I don't know about you, but those statistics have definitely got me thinking.

To learn more about Tappening and their bottled water campaign click here.