I am always in wonder at how some people complain about having no money.. and yet seem to have a blind spot on what they spend money on. Luckily for Mr Shanshan (whom I bet you’ve never heard of!) there are enough blind spotters in the world for him to become the 6th richest man in the world.
How did that happen? Simple. He bet on people’s blind spot and sold them exactly what they never needed but suddenly thought they did.
Bottled water.
Think about it. If you are 30 or over you still remember when you DIDNT see the need to buy bottled after. You drank water from your home tap. Then came the fear campaigns (and the chemicals!) that proved to you that water enclosed in a plastic sheath, and sold to you by a multinational was ‘better’.
Yes, it may be better if it can be proven it is chemical-free.. but the scores of cases already recorded of exposes of companies that just filled bottles with tap water make that one hard to accept. And now we know about the problems of plastics and the fact that we ingest the equivalent of a credit card of plastic EVERY MONTH.. the idea of a plastic bottle loses its attraction.
We all know about food miles. We have agreed that we should buy food locally where possible for many good reasons. But water? There’s that blind spot. Just grab a dozen of the supermarket shelf. They are on special this week.
Yes, there are some quite terrible water supplies. In the US there are over 200 cities that supply water with toxic levels of lead, a known brain toxin. In Australia, thousands of people are drinking water with carcinogenic PFOAs. In many countries fluoride, chlorine and chloramine have been added to ‘make our water safe’.
I’m sure Mr Shanshan can tell us hundreds of stories about how bad Chinese water supplies are.. and every time he does, he can watch his bank account grow. I have no argument with him. Perhaps given China’s water problems he is doing something good.. but honestly, at what cost to the environment and the world?
If you’d like to get off the bottled water merry go round, drop us a line and we’ll show you how you can massively reduce the money you spend on good water.. forever.