Why not use fountain water taps and your own stainless steel bottle or glass bottle?

Because once, when I did that, the water turned black within a matter of hours for unknown reasons.

A quick web search says that may have been due to manganese in the water, which turns black when it oxidizes.

In a glass or steel bottle?

Glass, refilled with initially clear water from a public drinking fountain.

Can't throw those in the freezer.

Can't throw these in a freezer either tho

Plastic water bottles? Why not?

The Dasani cans.

I guess it could work if You never leave the university's campus.

If only water coolers existed outside of universities...

It always amazes me the way people can't live without a water bottle in their hands.

You're not crossing Death Valley on a mule. You're riding to the mall in an air conditioned SUV.

Drink before you go. Find a water fountain. Heck, slurp out of the neighbor's garden hose. Why are people so fragile these days?

I say this as a guy who drinks from his garden hose: plenty of public water fountains are disgusting and I don't want to touch them.

A lot of people think public water fountains are gross because they don't understand them or how they work.

I once read a pretty good magazine article explaining that public water fountains are generally cleaner than most office water coolers. I don't remember all of the details, but in essence, it's because they are regularly inspected by professionals, and the water moving though the pipes to get to the fountain and then through the spigot reduces the chances of contamination. Unlike your office water cooler where the water sits around forever. We have to have a guy come out to de-funk our office water cooler every three months.

Amazingly, people have drunk from public water fountains for thousands of years and been just fine. Spend some time in Rome and watch hundreds of thousands of people drink from tens of thousands of public water fountains all day long, and amazingly the city hasn't been wiped out by the cooties.

Where do you live that just has water fountains everywhere? And is simultaneously practical to drive an SUV everywhere?

America.

Unless the glass is directly recycled (collected, washed and refilled with the same product) they are much more energy intensive than plastic or aluminium to produce.

The numbers I've seen say that glass uses less energy than plastic. 100% recycled aluminum beats glass, but a more realistic mix, or virgin aluminum, uses more energy than glass.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-...

Glass uses less energy per kilogram by a factor of 3 or so, according to your source. But plastic bottles use an order of magnitude or two less material, so still use less energy per bottle.

I think a lot of people are Ok using more energy to recycle glass (if true), instead of having trillions of pieces of plastic filling up the planet.

I doubt that selling Dasani water in aluminum cans in the Northeast US is going to move the needle on global plastic pollution, with the entire US accounting for less than 1% of plastic pollution (below countries such as North Korea and Algeria [1]) despite having 4% of the population and 24% of GDP.

[1] https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Calendar_2011_03_...

Breaks down better when it escapes into the environment than plastic does.

Because glass is a lot heavier than aluminum and there's way more loss due to breakage.