Speaking of the little things...

One night last week, I found myself looking curiously like a bag lady. I must have struck an interesting profile to anyone passing me by on Main West, laden as I was with discarded plastic bottles of various shapes and sizes. Was this some bizarre act of rebellion against effortless perfection? Had I decided that my i-banking-free future was so bleak that I should start collecting recyclables for their five-cent deposit?

Not quite. I had simply been walking back to my dorm from Wilson Gym when I passed the set of trash bins in front of Crowell Quad on Towerview Road and did a double take. They were overflowing, in classic Duke after-hours style, which was nothing odd in itself. But they were filled beyond capacity almost exclusively with plastic bottles. For once, I decided to stop and dig through the dregs of our collective waste-except there were no dregs, only recyclable containers.

Yes, I had gone a bit off the deep end, sustainability-style. And no, this single act, born of a decent amount of pent-up frustration and a dash of self-righteousness, does not make me better/holier/fill-in-the-blank-with-a-positive-adjective than you. Nor am I advocating that you, the reader, should do the same. The admissions office, for one, certainly wouldn't appreciate the damage to the Duke brand if we were all to become trash-pickers, no matter how good the intentions.

But as in my last column, where I challenged you to consider the far-reaching implications of what you eat, I would like to get you thinking about what you drink-or rather, how you drink it.

For today, I will only look at the impact of bottled water, rather than all bottled beverages, since there is a clear alternative to collectively buying the four billion gallons of bottled water consumed by Americans each year: You can get it for free (and we college students love free stuff) from one of thousands of water fountains and taps almost anywhere (water fountains, the water tab on soda fountains and your commons room sink are all good places to start). Here are a few reasons to invest in your very own $12 indestructible, reusable, dishwasher-safe Nalgene.

Plastic bottles' impact on the environment has been long lamented, and I won't rehash the classic arguments against filling our landfills with waste that leaches harmful chemicals into watersheds and won't break down for hundreds of years. Of course, these effects could be mitigated if more than 23 percent of bottles were recycled rather than simply thrown away. Though there should be a recycling bin next to every trash bin on campus to make the choice to recycle as opportunity cost-free and brainless as possible, in the meantime, consider holding on to your bottle for a few extra minutes until you see one, that is, if you haven't gotten that Nalgene yet or you forgot it for the day (like I sometimes am wont to do).

Maybe you're particularly worried about global warming or the depletion of current petroleum reserves. You'd be better off drowning your sorrows in a fresh pint at the Joyce than in bottled water. It takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the number of water bottles used annually by Americans, enough to fuel 100,000 cars per year, according to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. And that figure doesn't account for the fuel used to transport water, an extremely heavy item to haul around the world. Drinking local water, like eating local food, helps keep fuel consumption down.

The bottle habit is also hard on your wallet. If you drank your recommended eight glasses of water a day from bottles, you would spend an average of $1,400 per year on simply staying hydrated. Even if food points still feel like Monopoly money to you, there's no denying that spending half of the minimum food points allotment for the year on bottled water is probably not the best use of even "fake" money. In comparison, the same amount of tap water for the year would cost the average tax-payer only 49 cents, and most of us don't even pay municipal taxes at all.