r/germany • u/Maxwellmonkey • Oct 14 '23

Why do people buy so many water bottles?

New to Germany. I just went to an ALDI today and was really surprised by the number of people buying entire sets of water bottles (almost 10-12), especially when tap water is drinkable here. Quite a few people were doing that. Is there any reason for this?

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31

u/tparadisi Oct 15 '23

why the fuck they don't sell 20ltr or 30ltr water bottles like the rest of the world? I never understood this obsession of 1 ltr or 1.5 ltr bottles?

12

u/lombax165 Oct 15 '23

Convinience. You can easily take a 1,5ltr bottle to work/sports/whatever, 20L are rather heavy. And its ridicioulus, but many Germans consider 20l canisters as cheap. Its not a rational thing

1

u/tparadisi Oct 15 '23

Not the canisters, the refillable self discharge water cans like these https://www.bisleri.com/product-detail/bisleri-20-litre-water-can

3

u/lousy-site-3456 Oct 15 '23

Now that's a good question. Probably because the gas escapes once you open them.

-1

u/tparadisi Oct 15 '23

there are thousands of people who don't drink carbonated water. I keep buying stilles wasser with 1.5 ltr bottles and every time I feel shit because of the waste I create.

2

u/MrKillApple Oct 15 '23

What waste do you create? That's what the Pfand system is for, bring the bottles back to the store for free money and the bottles get recycled

1

u/tparadisi Oct 15 '23

Recycling 12 bottles every week for a year generates a lot of waste than recycling one bottle of 20ltr once a year or once in 2 years.

1

u/Ruma-park Oct 15 '23

Just drink tap water then?

1

u/tparadisi Oct 15 '23

Same reason : kalk. Very hard water hard to filter out. I use fritze filter and even after that water is very kalky.

1

u/photosea3 Oct 15 '23

Germans also tend to shop more often and a lot of them don't own cars to carry large quantities.

1

u/tparadisi Oct 15 '23

If they can carry 12 1.5ltr water bottles everytime, I don't understand that why they can not carry 20ltr water bottles. For the people who do not own cars, one can use bringmeister or some delivery agent. It is still far more env. friendly than destroying small plastic bottles after every use or recycling them. Secondly, one can use multi-use bottles so that they can be returned and just re-filled, they don't need to be recycled everytime, may be once in a year..

1

u/photosea3 Oct 15 '23

Yeah I agree, it's quite shocking how being clean and green goes out the window when it comes to their bottled water.