Protest Needless Packaging

I never considered myself much of an environmentalist. I understood the basics - pollution bad, recycling good, deforestation bad, local produce good - but never took an active interest aside from recycling my household waste and shopping at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza farmers' markets. Last summer, though, I read Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, and I'd say it helped me turn the corner from vaguely aware to truly concerned and increasingly proactive. Preceded by a documentary of the same name, Gone Tomorrow attacks the packaging industry, corruption in waste management, our current throw-away culture, and methods of waste disposal and recycling.
Perhaps the most upsetting revelations from the book are how ineffective recycling is in the bigger-picture sustainability movement and powerless consumers have been to make a difference. Even when we drop our water bottles and soda cans in a recycling bin, the amount of energy needed to transport them, transform them into something new, and redistribute them is more wasteful than just producing sturdy, refillable containers that we can tote with us wherever we go.

That being said, I'll refer you all to the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, which aims to turn more people on to tap water and off from bottled water. In particular, the campaign addresses the privatization of water, a public good. The campaign targets Coca-Cola's Dasani and Pepsi's Aquafina brands as being guilty of packaging and privatizing tap water, something that we all have access to, and selling it to the public at a cost way beyond what it would be to fill up at the nearest sink. It seems partly bizarre for people in the developed world, where water filtration systems produce perfectly drinkable water, to be hooked on the bottled stuff. If bottled water is to exist anywhere, why not in the developing world where access to quality drinking water is so limited?