Cool has its price: Designer ice on way

[Robbien]

GWENDOLYN BOUNDS
Wall Street Journal

You pay $2 a bottle for pure spring water, and $80 for 18-year-old scotch and cool it down with ... an ordinary cube of ice?

A handful of upstart businesses are hoping to persuade consumers, restaurants, airlines, hotels, hospitals and the military that they could be risking their health (and compromising good taste) by not buying prepackaged, upscale ice.

The concept differs from the plastic bags of premade ice that can be purchased at most supermarkets and convenience stores. These new products are sealed cube trays filled with unfrozen spring or filtered water and marketed as better-tasting than tap water and safer than ice handled by humans.

Icerocks, marketed as "secured spring water ice cubes," are set to hit the U.S. market in October. Four trays with slots for 12 cubes each will cost about $3.99. AquaICE sealed ice-cube trays -- containing purified municipal tap water in plain, lemon and lime flavors -- are already sold in a handful of Ohio stores. The product, made by aquaICE LLC of Dublin, Ohio, costs about $5 for 50 cubes.

It remains to be seen whether enough consumers will find it palatable to fork over 10 cents for an ice cube when it costs nothing to freeze a similarly functioning product from tap water.

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/business/15123314.htm

I thought the strain on the environment/energy resources from bottled water bottles was bad enough, now the idiots plan on enclosing a one inch cube of water with plastic. And other idiots will actually buy it.

[Deja Q]

1. Don't chemicals from plastic leech into the water,

which is why soft drinks, V8, and others taste different in plastic than they do in glass or any other sane medium?

[mcscajun]

8. You are correct. Freezing or heating water inside plastic does allow

elements from the plastic to alter and transfer themselves to the water.

Don't freeze your bottles of water, and don't leave them in hot cars in summer.

[billyoc]

18. I hope you're mistaken, I do this all the time.

The Mayo Clinic is calling this an email hoax. :shrug:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/dioxins/AN01276

[mcscajun]

19. I didn't get it from e-mail, but from one of the doctor's at our office.

He's a raw food and holistic type. I'll check into the Mayo Clinic link, though. Thanks.

[soothsayer]

2. We always fill up our trays with spring water. How hard is that?

[Robbien]

3. That spring water in your bottles could be the same Lake Michigan

water I get from my taps. One of the largest water bottlers (Nestle's which markets bottled water under the names of Poland Spring, Ice Mountain and Arrowhead) gets some of its water from the same Lake Michigan my city water comes from.

[babylonsister]

4. There are enough lazy people out there fascinated with

designer perks that have more money than sense to make this viable, sadly.

[Imperialism Inc.]

5. I recently switched to a filter on my tap.

I admit, I was a sucker and was buying bottled water for about a year. This was until I found out that municipal tap-water is more regulated than the bottled water. Tap water + a PUR (or Brita) filter is much much cheaper. That in taste tests a majority of people usually prefer the tap-water. And , most importantly, the amount resources being used to bring the bottled water to market and the often negative effects on the environment are simply unconscionable.

NRDC: Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?
http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/bwinx.asp

Executive Summary
More than half of all Americans drink bottled water; about a third of the public consumes it regularly. Sales have tripled in the past 10 years, to about $4 billion a year. This sales bonanza has been fueled by ubiquitous ads picturing towering mountains, pristine glaciers, and crystal-clear springs nestled in untouched forests yielding absolutely pure water. But is the marketing image of total purity accurate? Also, are rules for bottled water stricter than those for tap water?

Not exactly. No one should assume that just because he or she purchases water in a bottle that it is necessarily any better regulated, purer, or safer than most tap water. NRDC has completed a four-year study of the bottled water industry, including its bacterial and chemical contamination problems. We have conducted a review of available information on bottled water and its sources, an in-depth assessment of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and all 50 states' programs governing bottled water safety, and an analysis of government and academic bottled water testing results. We have compared FDA's bottled water rules with certain international bottled water standards and with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules that apply to piped tap water supplied by public water systems. In addition, NRDC commissioned independent lab testing of more than 1,000 bottles of 103 types of bottled water from many parts of the country (California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas). Our conclusions and recommendations follow.

...more...

The Effects of Bottled Water on the Environment
http://www.allaboutwater.org/environment.html

It is hard to argue the fact that waste management has become a large problem in the world, with landfills growing to enormous sizes and recycling rates remaining dismally low. The number of plastic bottles produced by the bottled water industry and subsequently discarded by consumers has only exacerbated this problem.

According to a 2001 report of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), roughly 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year.

Besides the sheer number of plastic bottles produced each year, the energy required to manufacture and transport these bottles to market severely drains limited fossil fuels. Bottled water companies, due to their unregulated use of valuable resources and their production of billions of plastic bottles have presented a significant strain on the environment.

The authors of the WWF report suggested that water bottles be washed and reused in order to lessen their negative impact on the environment. Unfortunately, reusing plastic bottles further compromises the quality of the water, due to the fact that more and more phthalate leaches its way into the water as the bottle gets older. In another suggestion, the authors recommended that bottled water companies use local bottling facilities in order to lessen fuel expenditures for transportation needs. Regrettably, local bottling further compromises water quality due to the reduced health standards for in-state bottled water production and consumption. It seems there is no feasible solution to this problem. The bottled water industry causes a severe strain on the environment, but solutions to this environmental damage significantly lessen the quality of water in the bottles.

Why Choose Filtered Water?
...more...

[acmavm]

6. What was it P. T. Barnum said about suckers and the

frequency of their birth?

[RedStateShame]

7. Why do you think Republicans are against birth control?

[ChickMagic]

9. Ugh. They're responding to the Grey Goose ad

"You want to improve the taste of Grey Goose? Improve the ice."

[geomon666]

10. Yeah there's nothing wrong with paying 4 dollars for ice.

I can't wait til they steal the PerriAIR joke from Spaceballs. Bastards.

[mdelaguna2000]

11. unnecessary environmental nightmare

we are devolving. Morons.

[XemaSab]

12. They're made from tap water???

What a scam.

[Robbien]

13. Some is bottled from municipal water and some comes from

pulling it up from ground water. They say they then send the water through filters before it is bottled but they say a lot of things, such as calling it "spring" water.

[XemaSab]

14. Municipal water

is tap water.

[Robbien]

17. Yup

Which is the fairer way the bottled water companies bottle water. They then at least pay the municipality for every drop they bottle.

When they pump ground water they do not pay the public a dime for the water. They buy the land and drill a well and start pumping away.

And you are right, the biggest idiots are the people who buy the bottled tap/ground water thinking they are getting some kind of special water.

[Dead_Parrot]

16. Ever come across Dasani?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3523303.stm
Soft drink giant Coca-Cola has admitted it is selling purified tap water in a bottle.
Followed by:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3550063.stm
Coca-Cola is to recall all bottles of its Dasani water in the UK, after levels of bromate were found to exceed legal levels.

In other words, they took tap water, made it toxic, then sold it.

Read 'em and weep.

[Raine]

15. I have an ice maker

that is part of my refrigerator why should I buy their crap when it's automatically done for me in my own home with no effort on my part. :silly:

[Triana]

20. I put a filter on my faucet and fill and refill my trays from that...

..because we don't NEED more damn plastic crap for landfills - but idiot people will buy it - and they'll toss it. Plastic NEVER biodegrades. EVER.

Anything to make a buck. And no matter WHAT it is, some morons will buy it.

[bleedingheart]

21. Proof a sucker is born every minute...

now if you live in an area where your tap water is unsafe or you are going somewhere and may not have access to water (like a hike) ...then it makes sense to buy water....but I have seen a lot of folks waste money on this bullshit...