Beyond McMansions and Green Homes: Thinking Household Sustainability Through Materialities of Homeyness

This chapter examines bottled water practices in Bangkok: how they function practically; how they become meaningful and normalised; and how they interact with everyday household water routines. The Home and Office Delivery (HOD) industry is often regarded as the environmentally friendly approach to dispensing bottled water because it reuses the large 19 litre polycarbonate (PC) bottles in which it delivers the product. In quite material and practical ways, the single-serve PET bottle helps to equip or furnish the mobile consumer. In urban Bangkok, where atmospheric contamination of rainwater has become a problem, many households and condominium residents inevitably enter into some sort of arrangement with the metropolitan tap water system. Since 1999 the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority (MWA), a state enterprise administered by the Ministry of Interior, has guaranteed that Bangkok tap water complies with WHO drinking water standards after treatment at the source.