Years? Days? Perhaps weeks? Perhaps the amount of time you need to drive to Canada and come back? Perhaps I am completely going insane…! Nothing has changed since the last time we spoke. I am still sitting in the back store of the superstore, with Miss Evian who is getting more and more winy as time goes by. Of course, I had to  tell Miss Evian the truth, an aggressive group of Bamboo bottles took over the supermarket. YES! THEY HAVE REPLACED US! THEY HAVE REPLACED PLASTIC BOTTLED WATER!! The change is official and so is the end of my liquid life! I must admit, it is something very hard for me to say, but people are finally sick of us! They have realized that plastic bottled water is a waste of money and has terrible consequences for the outside world.

Bamboo B. not only stole the heart of Miss Evian but also decided to steal my place as Supermarket King! The situation has gone over bored! His coup d’état was a success and he took over MY shelf, replacing all the plastic bottled waters with Bamboo B. clones. The saddest part in all of this is that customers seem to have already forgotten us!! What a shame! I am terribly offended every time I hear them say: have you heard about the coolest bottles? They are made out of glass, bamboo and a small part of plastic that is 100% recycled! This bottle last forever, unlike the plastic ones! Yes, and if you decided to get rid of it, the glass is 100% recyclable… ENOUGH! I can’t listen to those comments anymore!

I know that us normal boring plastic bottled water are not as cool as the new recyclable multiple use water bottles. I also know that every year close to 600 million of us end up in a landfill. Its not like it is MY fault if people don’t recycle us!?! Indeed Miss Evian reminds me all that time that because we are made of PO-LY-ETHY-POLY, no that’s not it, it sounded more like PO-LY-ETHY-LENE or something like that, we can be used only once for sanitation purposes. Poly something apparently is not good on the long term. I hear most people call it (PET). I wonder why?….Well as I was saying, the need for…AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

HELP ME WHAT IS GOING ON! WHO IS TOUCHING MEEEEEEE! LET MISS EVIAN ALONE!! OR ELSE YOU AR GOING TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH ME!!!

A strange voice exclaimed: “these two plastic bottled waters are slippery, funny thing it seems like the almost now their lives are over. Well, come to think of it not completely over, after the plastic will be recycled the bottles will probably reborn into something else like a kayak or a pullover”. A woman’s voice shrugged and told the man that once the bottles would reach the recycling facility they would get squished with all the other bottles made of PET and sold to reclaimers, companies that help process plastic. Machines later shred the plastic balls apart as the remaining flakes are melted and transformed into strands. These strands later get transformed into plastic pellets that will later serve to make other products like fiber for clothing or milk jugs.

Source: http://www.bamboobottleco.com/

Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0913/p18s02-hfks.html

“Bottled Water! I have had enough! You have got to tell me what is going on! Where are we?? Why am I SUPPOSE TO KEEP MY VOICE DOWN??! WHO ISN’T SUPPOSE TO HEAR US?? Where is Bamboo???” exclaimed Miss Evian with a very loud and impatient tone of voice.  Well, to tell you the truth, despite all the bad things that have happened to us I am happy Bamboo is out of the picture!! I decided I wasn’t going to tell her the complete truth but I had to tell her something: “Miss Evian, we are hiding in the back store of the superstore, because we are playing a game and the other bottles are not suppose to find us!”. I wonder if she is actually going to buy this lie! Knowing her I doubt it!

Miss Evian replied with an annoyed tone of voice: “First of all stop calling it the “superstore” it is a SU-PER MAR-KET!! It is not such a hard word to remember! Second of all, this game is ridiculously silly! I don’t want to be hiding out in the back store with those annoying bags of flour! I want to be out in the supermarket with mr Bamboo and you have NO RIGHT to keep me away from him!!!! If you don’t let me go right now, I will call the police of the supermarket! Frank the security guard that has arrested that little boy that one time tried to steal a chocolate bar…remember?”

I told Miss Evian to calm down and I decided to tell her the truth. The whole truth! Here I go! Miss Evian, I have got some bad news for you. They took over the shelf. All the rest of us are gone. This is why you have got to keep your voice down, we are the only two plastic bottled water left. If they found us it is over! We need to stay out here until I come up with some sort of plan.

“Bottled Water! WHO TOOK OVER THE STORE?!! WHERE ARE ALL OF OUR FRIENDS? SHOULD I BE AFRAID? replied Miss Evian with an alarmed tone!

TO BE CONTINUED…

Oh! You scared me Mrs. Goldendiamondy!! I feel like you are always sneaking up on me…Or maybe you just like playing hide in seek…? Well, Mrs. G. today is not a good day for me to play and have fun. I am sad and I don’t feel like listening to your usual advice.  Of course, you know her now, she just wouldn’t have and decided to tell me everything she knew about Miss E. Let’s call her Miss E. for now, it is less painful and it also has a sort of secret agent feel to it.  Anyways, Mrs. Goldendiamondy that the world on the aisle 5 of the superstore is that Miss E. has fallen madly in love with Bamboo B. ! Isn’t that name SO ridiculous?!!

What does Bamboo B. have that I don’t have?!? Maybe, he is older, maybe he is one of those new and hip bottles made of 100% recyclable plastic?

“No my poor child, the Bamboo water bottle is fresh, innovative and most importantly environment friendly” said Mrs. Goldendiamondy with a shrug. She went on and even told me that the Bamboo has a cool modern design with an exterior made out of wood as an outside shell protecting the inside element of the bottle that is made out of glass. The bamboo exterior protects the bottle from breaking up into a million pieces if it falls. Well what is a regular plastic bottled water suppose to do against the superman of bottles???! I have lost my battle!!  The Bamboo B. is invincible! You can reuse it as many times as you like! All the other bottles seem to be talking only about Bamboo! Apparently a customer that came to visit the superstore even dropped Bamboo B. on the hardwood floor and Bamboo B. survived without a single scratch! That is not fair! I can’t compete against a glass water bottled, let along a super bamboo glass bottle!  Bamboo B is like the Batman of bottles!!! This is not fair! Miss E. is a traitor! She replaced me so quickly with the next best thing! The other thing that truly worries me is that all customers seem to have fallen in love with Bamboo! They point and stare and keep on saying: “Look at this new bottle!! It is SO eco-chic! I need to buy one! Plus who needs plastic bottles anyways?!! They are SO not trendy anymore, a plastic bottled water is so 1995!”.

This is ridiculous!!! I am as much “ECO- CHIC” as Bamboo! Actually, I am super CHIC! Whatever that means…!

I need to come up with a master plan… A secret plan to get rid of Bamboo B! Muhahahaha!

TO BE CONTINUED.

Source: http://inventorspot.com/articles/sporty_and_green_bamboo_water_bottle

Well, good morning to you as weel my lovely friends!

It is a nice sunny day outside! Well, not that it makes any difference for me, since I am stuck in the superstore. No wait, the supermarket!  Well I don’t really know what they call it super, since its not that super to me…It is cold all the time, the lights are to strong and well people come and look at us through the glass…they stare, point and stare some more. Some of people actually are nice they open the door and pick me up! Boy does it tickle, but at least I feel warm for a couple of seconds. After reading the paper that is all around my tummy, they exchange looks, nod and usually but my right back on the shelf. This is starting to happen way too often lately. Does nobody want me anymore? Maybe because I have been here a while now and I am not the cutest one anymore. I want to get adopted I am nice!! Anyone out there?!!!

“You silly silly young boy! It has nothing to do with you not being the cute one anymore!” said Mrs. Goldendiamondy with a smear. Why does she always have to know the secret to everything! She quickly explained, that the problem is that people don’t like plastic water bottles anymore. According to miss know-it-all, more than 60 cities in the USA have banned the expenditure of tax dollars on other bottles like me. Everyone is now convinced that we are terribly bad for the environment and we get discarded, ruining the “natural habitat” of animals and the sea creatures. What is a “natural habitat”?? It sure sounds like a funny word! Is it a fancy grown-up way to say “home”? Well, then I guess my “natural habitat” is the cold fridge of the superstore! Nobody is ruining my habitat; I sure don’t want to disturb birds, and fish and bears by entering their homes uninvited.  Mrs.Goldendiamondy even told me that water is heavy and its transportation internationally uses a lot of energy that could be saved to serve more useful purposes. She even sounded very smart and cool when she told me with nonchalance that every year, the bottled water industry can generate around 30 000 tonnes of carbon dioxide only in transportation! Do you even realize how much 30 000 tonnes means? Well, I can’t this is why I am convinced it is super gigantic. Bigger than the supermarket, bigger than the city! Bigger than the earth?! I still have to figure that out but anyways that it is a lot of carbon dixide. I am not completely sure I understand what that long word carbondixide means, it probably is something for grown-ups, but it sure does sound important.

Well thank god I have Miss Evian to keep me company and keep me laughing all day long. She is very nice and most of all she is the prettiest plastic water bottle I have ever seen in my entire short life.  This is why, I must confess, if you promise you won’t tell anyone, I am kind of happy that customers visiting the superstore are putting us back on the shelves; leaving me and Evian alone!  I am kind of happy people are realizing the truth, the fact that they can save money, drinking fresh cold water from the tap in order to try to lower down the number of close to 30 million plastic bottles, daily abandoned in landfills where they are left to rot alone for the next thousand years.  Oh my liquid heart would break at the thought of empty miss Evian, cold and alone in a landfill for the next hundred years to come…. Thank god customers are slowly waking up…!

Mrs. Goldendiamondy has been like this all week! She just won’t leave Miss Evian alone for one second. It seems like she is always looking for excuses to talk to her or to steal her away from me. I am oh so happy that in the end Miss Evian decided to stay with us at the supermarket instead of trying to escape to go to the Rice-Castle with all of the other important French water bottles.  Oups! Yah, your right! I get confused all the time; it’s not the Rice-Castle but the Ritz Carlton! I still think that the “Rice-Castle” sounds so much funnier! I can just imagine a big castle made out of rice! Hahaha! But what is the Ritz-Carlton anyways?? Mrs Goldendiamondy told me it is a place like the supermarket but instead of being for bottles it is for real people. Sounds funny, I didn’t know they had people supermarkets as well… I need to ask Mrs Goldendiamondy to tell me more about those places like the Ritz, I think that they are called something like “botels”, or was it “motels”? No wait I am pretty sure they are called “hotels” now that I think of it!

Anyways, Miss Evian doesn’t need the Rice-Castle, she seems to be doing better at the super-market! Now that we have made peace we are really good friends and I like chatting with Miss Evian, she is very nice and funny. Last night, she was telling about her cousin from Australia, Aussie Bottled Water, who is being moved to America. Aussie comes from the town of Bundanoon in Australia. I don’t know about you but I think the name Bundanoon is absolutely hilarious! Well, anyways, getting back to my story, Miss Evian told me that Aussie was “deported” to the United States because Bundapoo, I mean, Bundanoon is the first city in the world to have completely banned bottled waters like me, from the shelves of all stores! I am not really sure what deported mean, but it doesn’t sound too good especially since Miss Evian told me that Aussie was so sad to leave her home. This is scary, they are trying to kick us out from everywhere! First the Rice-Castle and now Bundaboo!

Of course, right when Evian was telling me this story about her cousin, Aussie, Mrs. Goldendiamondy was spying on us and she immediately jumped in saying: “ once someone buys us and finishes all of our water we usually end up being discarded somewhere in the environment or in the ocean where the fish never welcome us in a very warm manner”.  I’ m not sure I understand what discarded means, but I sure know I love the beautiful ocean and the fish and I surely don’t want to get them mad.  I trust Mrs. Goldendiamondy, she is older than all of us here and seems to know many top secrets things! She sure is nice even if she is making me worry with all her talks about how we, plastic bottles, are so bad for the environment! At lunch, she even told me that we cost a thousand times more than normal water that comes from the sink !!! A THOUSAND TIMES!!! That sure sound like a lot! I hope our water has some magical powers because I really don’t understand why people would spend so much money on water they can get from their own kitchen. Maybe it is a grown up thing that I can’t understand who knows…! Oh! I have to run, or should I say, roll, tonight I am going to have lunch with Miss Evian!

(Source: http://www.thegreenguide.com/food/buying/bottled-water, http://www.justmeans.com/-Battle-Ban-Bottled-Water/20493.html)

Do you remember last time we talked, that I told you about my new friend from France! Her name is miss Evian, she is very lean and elegant, and she speaks English in a funny way. She keeps on telling me: “ I want to return to my maison in France!” She sure is silly, I don’t even know what a “maison” is! The word does sound funny “mai –son”. Maybe she means to say “my son” but her French accent makes the word sound strange. Oh, but I do hope she doesn’t have a son! She seems so young! If she has a son does that also mean that she has a husband bottle? Well not that I care!

Anyways, the other day miss Evian was telling me about this beautiful place where all the nicest and prettiest water bottles get send to the Rice- Castle! She told me it is a lovely castle where rich people go to sleep and eat in gold plates. Wait, it wasn’t called Rice -Castle, I think it was something more like Ritz- Carlot…Oh I know, I know the Ritz-Carlton! Well, miss Evian isn’t being very nice, since she thinks she is better than the rest of us, the other water bottles from the super market and that she should be in a prettier place. What she doesn’t know is that Mrs Goldendiamondy, the oldest water bottle in the super market, who knows a lot of grown up things, told me that the Ritz-Carlton doesn’t like plastic water bottles anymore. According to Mrs Goldendiamondy, 73 of the Ritz Carlton castles have blocked the entrance to us simple plastic water bottles and have chosen “plant-based, biodegradable materials for special water bottles”.  Bio-de-gra-da-ble, that sounds like a very long and complicated word for grown-ups.  I want to be a special water bottle!! I want to be a super “bio-gra-da-ble” bottle! Not quit sure what it means, but it does sound pretty cool to me! Almost like the name of a super hero bottle!

When I asked Mrs Goldendiamondy why miss Evian could not entre the Rice-Carlote Castle she says that us, water bottles from the supermarket we are “old and made from crude oil and we take way to much energy to be produce”. Again with that thing called “oil”! It must really be a bad bad thing from the way everyone talks about it!  Well, anyways, Mrs Goldendiamondy – Gosh that is a funny name!! – also told me that people at the Carlton Castle prefer the new bio-de-gra-da-ble bottles because they cost the same price or even cheaper than we do but they are much nicer to the environment and much easier to transport. My cousin the bottled water from Chicago even told me that over there, the plastic bottles are now 5 cents more expensive so that way less people will want to buy them! That is funny, no everyone is against us! Well I am sure things would be different if all of us were bio-gra-da-ble, no wait, I think it was something like bio-de-gra-da-ble! Well, either way, I think Miss Evian won’t be too happy when she hears of this! Well, it is not so so bad in the end that the people for the Ritz Castle don’t want miss Evian, that way she can stay with us at the supermarket!

Last time we talked I told you about my daddy PET and my mummy WATER. Well since I have been sitting in this superstar, oh…no wait…what was it called again?? Oh right, the supermarket! What was I saying, right, since I have been sitting in this supermarket well I have been feeling pretty lonely without my dad and mom. Water, my mom, tells me she is doing lovely, she lives in a lovely peaceful environment with trees, birds and sunshine. For some reason, my mom still won’t explain what are those feathery things called “birds”. Maybe it is something only grownups can understand.

Now that I have to spend all my day in this cold fridge at least I have had some time to make friends with the other bottles sitting next to me. In this multi-cultural environment, I have made friends with water bottles that come from all over the world. Last night, when all the people in the supermarket left, and it got dark all of a sudden, I met this French bottle who just got in last night. She is elegant and nice but seems a bit nostalgic; maybe she misses her home. The French bottle was very tired last night, she told me she traveled all the way from France from her home spring called “Evian”. What a funny name don’t you think?? She traveled by road, her transportation all the way to America required 5.8 MJ. That is a long way to travel and it most have cost a lot of time and energy to bring her here. It’s funny, because we already have so much water in America, I wonder why all this trouble to bring the poor bottle so far away from her hometown Evian. Well, right now she is sleeping, so I guess I am going to have to wait until tomorrow to ask her more questions about her trip. But what if she is gone by tomorrow afternoon??? Oh no, that would be so sad for me to loose a new friend. The other night I heard the King of the supermarket talking and he said that Americans consume about 33 billion litres of bottled water a year! That’s a lot of us! By the way, what does “consume” means?! Anyway, he was saying this is the equivalent in energy terms of around 50 million barrels of oil!! Can you imagine all that oil?? Well…to be honest I can’t…I’am not even sure what that funny word “oil” means…! But still, that just doesn’t sound to good to me…. Plus 33 billion litres, that is a ridiculous amount of bottles disappearing every year. I hope they won’t take miss Evian away from me just yet! Tonight sure is a lonely night, maybe I should wake up miss Evian and ask her to tell me more about her adventurous trip to America….

(Data source: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/38143)