“ECO-CONSCIOUS,” it says in capital letters. This on a water bottle, a nice water bottle, stainless steel, the kind you can refill … amazing genius this invention of a water bottle, being on the flip side we use 50 billion bottles of water annually, whose overall recycling rate is 23 percent.

It is the professional grouch in me that does not want to be told drinking water out of a stainless steel water bottle is ECO-CONSCIOUS. Or that drinking water out of a glass or a faucet instead of a one-way bottle is eco-conscious. I’m not convinced it is ECO-CONSCIOUS to be simple about water.

And as long as I’m in the grouch mood, there is the cellphone, Twitter and Facebook universe that has decided everything is important enough to share, if the next best thing to hate is bottled water.

If you really want to know why institutions and companies like Morgan Stanley and AIG and GMC were on the edge of extinction, you only have to compute that 90 percent of us drink our water from a plastic bottle shipped half way across the country, if not from France, to deliver water to people who don’t sweat anyway. Whose office is air conditioned, who every morning dab aluminum salts under their arms so they don’t sweat even if they tried.

When the idea of a central Wisconsin bottled water plant was proposed, I was not particularly distressed at the thought of shipping millions of bottles of water out of the region since we already ship millions of bottles and cans of beer and milk, of potatoes, sweet corn, snap beans, beets, carrots and similar semi-equivalents of bottled water.

What bothered me was why contribute to the insanity of shipping bottled water anywhere, even to someone dumb enough to pay good money for what every faucet, fire hydrant, dog dish and lavatory already provide. Making money doing something stupid isn’t making money so much as making stupid.

However cruel is this notion, to see on the shelf that reusable stainless steel water bottle while being told it’s ecological makes allowances for dumb I don’t think countries that give diplomas to people for graduating from high school and college should ever have to say.

A dumb list:

* Bottled water uses 17 million barrels of oil annually and does not include the oil for their transportation.

* $1 billion in recyclable plastic is wasted every year and our illustrious former senator was critical of the Air Force for spending $700 for toilet seats, no mention if those were ejection seats.

* The recommended eight glasses of water daily at the average municipal water rate cost 49 cents for a year.  In the form of bottled water, $1,400.

* And if your city just happens to get its water from Flint, Mich., a filter pitcher can replace 300 16oz. water bottles before the filter needs replacing. The water tastes good besides. It is the continual task of water utilities to deliver to billions of hunter-gatherers who are no longer camped next to the stream, and to know there are marketable odds a municipal water system will run into a snag once in a while, metals, arsenic, strontium and lead; if algae toxins are the worst, they don’t readily filter out.

* People buy bottled water because it looks cool, we think the water is better, we are programmed to prefer brand names, and it seems smart. If only some of this were true.

* Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coke’s Dasani represent 24 percent of the bottled water market. Both brands use filtered municipal water not water from glaciers, not mountain springs, not the fountain of youth, not even Bathsheba’s bath water as would be my preference.

* Public water as regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as requires daily multiple tests for bacteria, the results are public information. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates bottled water, testing is weekly and is not public.

* The U.S. consumes 1,500 bottles of water per second, as reported for a project called Watershed in New York City for a world premiere of the “Age of Stupid.” (P.S.: New York City water surpasses all federal and state health standards.)

* It is said plastic will never biodegrade … I personally question this but the accusation fits my mindset here.

* The resource to make all those water bottles would fuel a million cars for a year, 2 million Priuses.

* In the Los Angeles area alone, 10 metric tons of plastic are carried into the Pacific Ocean daily, and the really odd thing is, nobody put it there.

* Fifty Percent of the plastic we use is one-time use, that next ream of paper, tub of margarine, that package of batteries.

* On average Americans toss 185 pounds of plastic away annually.

* Plastic amounts to 10 percent of the waste stream.

* Plastics utilize 8 percent of the world’s petroleum production.

* On a world scale we generate 1 million plastic bags per minute, 500 billion annually, and the Wisconsin State Legislature just banned municipal bans on plastic bags … battle of the bans.

* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in the North Pacific is a mass twice the size of Texas, where the pieces of plastic outnumber the sea-life, on average 46,000 pieces per square mile.

* As for nanoparticles of plastic, you don’t want to know … so OK, 1.7 million per square mile … admittedly they are nano.

* Ninety-three percent of Americans 6 years old or older carry Bisphenol A (BPA) in their bodies, plastic, some is surgical, some uplifting, most isn’t.

* So much for the Age of the Anthropocene.