Member-only story
You Have No Bottled Water. Why not?
A wake-up call
I’ll be honest with you.
When the UK government launched its “Be Ready” campaign last month, advising every household to keep three days’ worth of food, bottled water, and essentials on hand to get through a national emergency, I didn’t take any action.
I do a weekly online grocery shop that provides my family with a week’s worth of food and drink. I believed that to be enough.
And then the other day, someone challenged me on the fact that I had no bottled water in the house. She implied I was being irresponsible. I have two children. What if our water supply gets cut off? What are we going to drink?
I was taken aback.
Who was she to judge? It gets my back up when people stick their noses in and pass judgment on how I live my life.
I stopped buying bottled water three years ago. It was my way of reducing plastic consumption in my household to combat climate change. The expectation to start stocking up on bottled water didn’t sit well with me. Are we forgetting that a contributing factor to the increased frequency of national emergencies caused by extreme weather events happening around the world is man’s use of plastics?
