I’m not a New Year Resolution kind of guy.
I haven’t made one in years. I just think it’s strange to mark one day of the year as a time to make a change. I prefer to make such changes all the time, when the need arises. I’m not judging. Any time someone makes a change for the better is a good one, even if it’s once a year.
I think the problem I have is that I dislike automatic event-based obligatory actions, like the expectation of a Hallmark card on every card-giving holiday or buying people stuff off their (lengthy) Christmas list. There’s nothing wrong with card and gift-giving, I just don’t like when the thought is replaced by convenience.
Nor am I a “tree hugger”. (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
But here’s a change I can get behind and only here on the new year because I just happened to hear about it on New Year’s Eve when my friend Lori was over. Her brother, Eric Yaverbaum, helped kick off a war against bottled water last year with his Tappening initiative.
If you think about it for a sec (really. a sec.) you can easily see how absurd this whole bottled water craze is. It started with the spring water companies, but it didn’t take Coca Cola and Pepsi long to figure out that they could make a killing by putting tap water into bottles and selling them for prices higher than soda. Huh?
Consider all the resources used to process (electricity, partly from petroleum), transport (more petroleum), and bottle (yep, plastic is made from petroleum) the stuff that flows right into your house.
What a waste. And oil reached $100 a barrel yesterday.
I think I’m one of the few people I know who happily drinks tap water, so this isn’t a stretch for me in practice. We live out in the woods west of Boston and we get our water from a well. Therefore, we had the water tested and it’s actually quite pure. My wife isn’t convinced, however, and will drink it if it’s filtered. So we got a refrigerator with a filter on a water tap. It can’t possibly do much to it as there isn’t much in it in the first place, but it makes her feel better.
And she does, however, drink a good amount of bottled water. Tsk, tsk.
So I’m going to break my “no new year’s resolution” policy.
Here it is: Get my wife to stop drinking bottled water. 
And I’ve told you about it. You might take a moment to consider your own bottled water habits.
Pay it forward. Write about it.
Quiz!: The first person who comments here with the (1) correct name of the movie the title of this post came from, and (2) who said it, and who is (3) willing to tell me their mailing address, gets a free Tappening reusable bottle. Well, not entirely free. It’ll be purchased by me.)
UPDATE: More Free Tappening Bottles
We’ve got a winner to the quiz, but the guys at Tappening.com have noticed this post and offered up some bottles for me to give away to my readers. Here’s how you can get one.
All us affiliate marketers drink water all day long at our desks, right? (Except Shawn Collins who drinks diet Dr. Pepper). That’s a lot of bottled water! If you’ve got a blog, write something about this topic. Post a trackback and I’ll send you a cool Tappening bottle. Act fast to get yours!
