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BANG FOR THE BITE
If 10,000 Biters make their own soda at home, we'll keep 6,000,000 aluminum cans outta the waste stream each year.
COCKTAIL FACT
Each year, Americans drink more carbonated soft drinks than juice, sports drinks, coffee, and tea combined.
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home › tip library › DIY Soda
What's more profitable than selling soda?
The Bite
Not much. Soft drink markups are so high that if we didn't loathe disposable containers so much, we'd probably have a go at creating the next Fanta. 'Til then, we'll make our own soda, sans cans or bottles, thankyouverymuch.The Benefits
- Liquid-asset raising. A glass of DIY soda can cost just a couple dimes after the initial investment, versus, say, a $1.29 medium Coke at a fast food restaurant.
- Less container waste. Making soda at home saves transport energy, plus it takes a lotta energy to mine aluminum for cans and produce plastic for bottles (even recycled ones).
- It's fast and easy. Even faster and easier than making coffee.
- It can be healthier, since you get to decide what goes into the bevvies (maybe skip the corn syrup in favor of an alternative sweetener).
Personally Speaking
Even nonsoda-drinkers on the team liked the sparkling water with lemon we whipped up using the Soda-Club gizmo.Wanna Try?
- Soda-Club Starter Kit - easy-to-use soda maker that comes with reusable bottles; note that soda packets contain Splenda ($80).
- Mr. Fizz Seltzer Bottle - plug in most CO2 cartridges (available at its site), and get seltzer on the go ($63).
- Nature's Flavors Syrup Sampler Pack - six flavors of organic syrup for DIY Italian sodas; makes about 16 servings per bottle ($30/6 bottles).
Mar 26,2008
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Time in a Bottle
I'm not sure how I ever got started on sparkling water, but it slowly but surely has become a staple at home. A cold glass of carbonation beats out any other drink post bath, and after adding sparkling to an old-fashioned cocktail on a whim, I can never go back.
And I've thought about how these DIY soda machines end up saving resources and energy used creating bottled water, but it recently occurred to me how much personal energy I save by using one. No hauling a case of glass bottles to my Zipcar, through the 30-ton front door, up the elevator. No shuffling of golf clubs, suitcases, amps, and old fencing gear around in the closet to make space for it. After drinking it: no stacking the bottles, taking them down the elevator, or loading them into the recycling bins (with the risk of running into weird neighbors).
Now I just need to get a few of them into my fave local restaurants, like the bottle-conscious eateries we've covered in NY and Chicago.
-Jenifer Morgan...off to fizz...
Biter Comments...
Great tip!! For me, sparkling water had long been an unenvironmentally friendly guilty pleasure (even though I recycle the bottles).
Has anyone used these machines? Are they any good??
We have used The Soda-maker for about a year now and I have 2 teens and 2 early twenty girls still at home.
We have tried most of their flavors and all are very close to the flavor of the Coke,Pepsi,etc.
The plus side is very long,
clear complexions
NO cans
NO bottles
less sugar
less sodium
I could keep going
but you all get the drift.
Never been a soda drinker,but for those that adore the stuff this seems like a great bite for our environment,and for your bodies. Less sugar and chemicals.
Glad to hear from someone who's used this. Can anyone say whether it's possible to get a close Coke facsimile (a Pepsi-like taste won't fly in our house)? We have a serious Coke-aholic and a big club soda drinker here, so this could be a real help.
Anita, friends recently turned me on to kombucha tea while I was looking for an alternative to beer to help me shed some pounds. You are a brave soul to try making your own -- the only way I can continue to drink it is to forget everything I read and saw about how it is made. Eww! But it's much lower in calories than beer, as well as being more nutritious, so I think I will enjoy it in moderation. I am concerned about the effects of acidity on stomach and tooth enamel of drinking it frequently.
i am all for less plastic in our environments
however please research what the carbonation/CO2 is doing to your body.
no matter where you get it from: a can of coke, sparkling water, ( unless it is NATURALLY sparkling water )or from making your own, CO2/carbonation leaches calcium from your bones, a silent yet wicked side effect that many people are unaware of. . ..this is one of the reasons we have such high incidence of osteoporosis in this country. . .please do not give soda to your kids!!!
Soda is a staple for me, but with boundaries: no caffeine and nothing smaller than a 2L bottle. No, I don't drink all 2L at once, BUT I have noticed that there ALWAYS some great sale on 2L bottles at the grocery store (usually Coke products one week, Pepsi the next, store brand the week after).
I refuse to pay more that $0.99 for a bottle. That's like buying cans for $0.18 each (better than Costco!). And, there's about 5 times less packaging.
BTW, I always drink regular soda...especially after all these studies showing that the nasty chemical sweeteners cause one to gain more weight than natural sweeteners (corn counts as natural). I believe this is what helps me maintain my BMI of 21.4 and 12.5% body fat. All this with almost no exercise. Gotta love the soda diet!
You can go the DIY soda route if you like (it's WAY too pricey for me, plus, it's not available everywhere), but I'm sticking with my canned Diet 7-Up, thankyouverymuch! I don't drink Diet Coke (don't like the stuff) or Diet Pepsi (although I DO like that), or any other dark-colored diet soda because of the caramel syrup used, plus, I make a bit of spending money when I take my empties to the recycling machine! (Ya know, I'll bet more people would recycle more stuff if they got a monetary incentive for their trouble like they do when they recycled their empty soda cans and bottles.)
Mark, as for artificially-sweetened diet sodas causing one to gain more weight than their sugar-sweetened counterparts, sorry to burst your (soda) bubble, but that's just a plot on the part of the sugar industry. It's simply a scare tactic they're using to get us to ingest even MORE sugar than we already do. They're just afraid of losing more business to the artificial-sweetener folks. Drinking that gosh-awful high fructose corn syruped (caffeinated or not), sugar-laden regular soda has nothing whatsoever to do with your 21.4 BMI and your 12.5% body fat. You can thank your genetics/metabolism -- NOT those sugary regular sodas you love -- for those numbers.
I was wondering where the recycling machine is??
Less sugar, this is the key.
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Posted by: Anita | March 26, 2008 at 10:18 AM