Yes, I get the reasons, and I try to avoid buying small bootles of drinking water, but living here in East Java, Indonesia right now with my one-year old baby girl, I am drinking the watercooler-sized plastic bottles on the dispenser.

It is a poor, rice farming village where you cannot be certain about the quality of the well water without testing that is not readily available. It would need to be done for each household on a monthly (minimum) basis to account for the rainy/dry season, periods of fertilizing, and spraying of pesticides. It is simply not practical, and requires a huge cultural shift, and money. I am currently working on rubbish removal here too just out of personal reasons. That and bringing awareness to rubbish burning, and improper disposal. Slow and hard going. On the positive side, people here do reuse a plastic bottle for at least 10 more uses before discarding them unlike my peers back in NY.

I think the dismissal, or using Flint as more reason to not drink bottled water is unsubstantiated. Political ineptitude/corruption seems to have been the main cause there, or at least why it continued hidden for so long. Truthfully I have not followed it lately, and apologize if this is now incorrect. Although, Flint has made me question my own municipal drinking water back in Brooklyn, NY where I was born and raised. I am not sure it makes me feel better that it could be hidden for so long Flint. I realize plastic bottling has its cons as well.

I am not sure about using cans or glass. Cans have their spoilage history. They are usually coated, and I would think they weigh more, so incur a higher transportation fuel cost. Glass is easy to break, cause injury, and heavy. I like it, and personally I reuse glass containers from purchased foods all the time. Maybe a reinforced glass that could be thin and resist breakage like Pyrex? I love the material.

Plastic bottles are noisy, since the walls are very thin, because they minimized the amount of PET used to maximize profits. Therefore the amount of plastic is less than most back-of-the-envelope calculations I have seen. The energy value of one 500ml PET bottle is worth less than a penny, and that is after collecting and processing them. Recycled PET costs more than new. And, because they are thin, and compress easily, they take up a lot less of landfill than most people imagine. I still don't like it, and wish for a better solution; I just like to put real numbers on things, and focus my energies on things that provide the most return on my efforts.

The annual gas you use to shop for your other goods far exceeds the carbon footprint of the roundtrip cost of your plastic water bottle by two or more orders of magnitude. Unless like me back in the US, you biked to the store. Now the food is right around me. No market runs!

Same goes for plastic bags. They are so much thinner and stronger than a decade ago, and I am not sure paper bags were the way to reduce carbon footprint, or net a postive return for the environment, but it made a lot of first-worlders sleep better at night for the wrong reasons. I had the dirt floor here tiled though, so I am still a first-worlder, and I guess I will always be!

I dislike the sound of crinkling water bottles, and find the plastic accordion simile hilarious and true!

Tidbit: I took care of one of the world's largest commercial indoor pools over here in SE Asia for over 5 years, so I am very familiar with water treatment and filtration too. There are a lot of misconceptions about it. For instance, if you smell 'chlorine' it's not chlorine, since chlorine is odorless. You are smelling the byproduct of the free chlorine having broken down some organic matter like sweat, urine and skin into. You are smelling chloramines, and they are not an indicator of a sterile or safe pool.