Our View

Let's play a game.

You are facing two toll bridges that both get you to your destination, and you have to pass over one every day. The toll for the first bridge is one-twentieth of one cent. The toll for the second, more scenic bridge, which will save you five minutes, is more than two dollars. In a year, that's 18 cents vs. $730. Which will you choose?

If you are like 54 percent of Americans, you're willing to fork over more than 4,000 times the cost of the toll to cross the second bridge.

Sound ludicrous? Take that idea and think about the water you drink: You could get more than 4,000 bottles of Kirksville tap water for the cost of one blue-tinted bottle of Dasani or Deja Blue.

But tap water isn't cold, it doesn't come in convenient 22-ounce containers and - horror of horrors - to drink it, we'd have to operate a faucet to get our H2O fix. In our instant-gratification culture, it's easy to get used to having everything we need in portable, plastic packages. And we're ready to shell out big bucks to get things that way.

But that capability doesn't stretch across the globe. We applaud Campus Christian Fellowship for its sponsorship of the Blood:Water Mission fundraiser (see story, page 16), which we hope will water a seedling of knowledge about the grave hardships of others.

Some Americans cite danger as their reason for drinking bottled water - they think tap water isn't verifiably safe. But in 2005 as part of a 20/20 special, microbiologist Aaron Margolin from the University of New Hampshire compared five bottled waters with tap water and found no difference in the levels of illness-causing bacteria. Other scientists have had identical results, according to a 2005 ABCNews.com article. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration allows a low level of fecal matter in bottled waters, but the Environmental Protection Agency does not permit any human waste in tap water, according to a May 2007 article by the Environment News Service.

But if we can pay for the packaging and the purification and we find it easier to grab icy Aquafinas from our fridges rather than to refill cups with lukewarm water that tastes of minerals, why shouldn't we?

There are two reasons. In the short-term, can we really afford to feed - or rather, quench - this habit? What are we giving up in order to pay multinational corporations $9.2 billion per year for something we can get virtually for free? The average college graduate carries $19,000 in debts. If you forgo buying a bottle of Bulldogua every day during your time at Truman, you'd save more than $2,000.

More importantly, in the long run, millions of tons of polyethylene terephthalate, an oil-derived plastic, are used every year to create all those disposable water bottles, and less than a quarter of the bottles are recycled. The exponentially growing use of natural resources such as oil is contributing to the weather patterns that intensify the droughts in places like Kenya, where some citizens already do not have consistent access to potable and portable water.

So let's recycle our one-time-use water bottles, invest in some more durable containers and rediscover our faucets.

Otherwise, we might never get to face those hypothetical toll bridges - there won't be anything running underneath them.