You can drink it free

Scripps Howard: A dispatch from Berkeley, Calif., courtesy of the Associated Press, says that there is a growing backlash against bottled water. Since Berkeley seems like one of those places where this whole craze got started, attention must be paid.
Style-setting restaurants like Chez Panisse are now serving tap water to assuage the environmental concerns of customers who worry about the energy consumed and the emissions generated in pumping water out of the ground in, say, Italy, bottling it and then shipping it all the way over here. It's amazing how everything now seems to come back to global warming.
The whole bottled-water thing is puzzling in any case, because one of the adornments of American civilization is that you can drink the water. We take safe tap water for granted, which can cause a couple of agonizing days for trusting American travelers in less sanitary locales.
Water fight
The bottled-water people aren't going to take this backlash lying down, and a few Web links from the International Bottled Water Association -- even if you didn't know for sure, you're probably not surprised there is such an outfit -- show why.
Bottled water is now America's second-most-popular beverage after what the industry calls CSDs, carbonated soda drinks. Remember, this is a product competing with an identical product that people basically get delivered free to their homes, available in any room with a faucet.
Consumption was 28.3 gallons per capita in 2006 and has been growing by about a gallon a head a year.