Right, I see water as particularly egregious as it's a natural product (literally pumped straight from the ground) and should be accessible in clean form anywhere in the developed world (aka most places where water bottles are commonly bought and thrown away). The solution to dirty water shouldn't be putting clean water in plastic bottles and shipping it around the world, it should be making sure water is clean enough that anywhere you go you can drink the local water without needing to buy a one-time-use plastic bottle.

It doesn't help that our solution to dirty water (plastic bottles) is making even clean water unusable (microplastic).

The infrastructure to deliver other drinks without bottles is easy and has existed since the 19th century. Just ship the flavoring agents in some sort of syrup form, and mix it with water at the dispensation site. Force-carbonate it onsite, if you like.

Compared to bottles, it has the added advantage of being really inexpensive. So much so that, when places like gas stations and convenience stores sell the same beverage in both fountain and bottled forms, the fountain version is typically sold at a steep discount relative to the bottled one.

on the other hand, this method has the substantial disadvantage that beverages delivered this way usually taste significantly worse than their bottled counterparts.

I suspect "natural" products like fruit juice necessarily suffer from being made into concentrates and reconstituted on demand. I'm not sure why it should be this way with soda, but in my experience soda from a bottle always tastes way better than from a fountain.

>beverages delivered this way usually taste significantly worse

As someone who prefers fountain soda and avoids bottle sodas due to taste (i believe it is level of carbonation), this is highly subjective and I urge you to look beyond your personal tastes (heh) on this subject.

Maybe we can convince the companies bottlibg water to use glass or steel cans like they do for juice and sugar water.

The article talks exactly about this, and it still doesn’t address the fact that waste is still generated when we have better infrastructure for moving clean water.