ubiquitous obscenity

bottled water, everywhere. Lined up on roadside kiosks, crowding the shelves of tiny dukas (shops) in Stone Town. When I was a child, there were taps, drinking fountains, in the cities and towns of East Africa. There was an automatic democracy in the way middle-class travellers and tourists queued up with the poorest street dwellers to fill water bottles.

To paraphrase global activist-environmentalist-icon, Vandana Shiva, the privatisation and sale of bottled water, at the expense of providing universal public access to clean drinking water, is the ultimate human rights violation. And the ultimate environmental disaster. The manufacture of plastic bottles is toxic in the extreme. Recycling is a myth. Billions of 'recycled' bottles simply end up in gigantic waste dumps. It takes more energy, more plastic, to recycle a bottle, than to make a new one.

Along with plastic bags, plastic bottles are the new ground cover of the African continent. They overflow out of waste bins, litter every public space, float in ditches and rivers.

My personal act of resistance to bottled water is a dogged dedication to carrying my own, non-disposable water bottle everywhere I go. Along with water purification tablets. I fill my bottle from the taps, wherever I am.

It's simple and easy. Anyone can do it. Carry two one-liter water bottles when you travel. Fill them from local taps. Drop a purification tablet in each one. Let it dissolve and sit for two hours.

On a daily basis, count up the liters of water you drink, and the number of plastic bottles you haven't contributed to the plague.