Thinking twice about a smoothie?

A girl walks into a juice bar.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

A girl walks into a juice bar and orders her favorite strawberry colada smoothie. She happens to be in California, but it could be in another state, really. It's the same smoothie she's been ordering for several months. The place is a convenient walk from work and the juice gives her a healthy boost of energy after a stressful morning.

It also costs her more than some meals, but I digress.

At some point between the thirtieth and the fortieth time she's gotten juice here, something makes her stomach sink. First she notices that all of the cups are styrofoam. She thinks about this, really takes it to heart. This one place alone produces tons of styrofoam waste a day. No one reuses these cups. How many drinks do they sell per hour? Per week? None of this biodegrades, and she's read many articles stating that the country's landfills are filling up at an alarming rate.

Okay, she says, but look, they have these reusable plastic cups for sale. She watches closely to see if anyone buys them.

No one does.

She buys one. She tries it a few times. They deduct five cents from her purchase price every time she uses it. She starts to think five cents is a really low deduction for the benefit of saving the land from the impact of another styrofoam cup, plus the water and energy she uses cleaning it each time. She spent over three dollars on the cup. Why only five cents? Enough to say that they went to a slight effort, but not enough to actually motivate most people to use one. She begins to get irritated with the place.

So they don't use biodegradable cups, and they don't reward people for using their alternative source. Strike one against them.

She halfheartedly buys a drink every now and then, because the juice is still good, but she can't feel too good about all of that waste.

Then comes the thing that really gets her. It's the sort of thing that she can't help but say something about. The anger builds under her fingertips and deep in her chest.

Smack in the front of the store, where the employees are assembling their ingredients for juicing, are the spoons, in a dish, under the faucet. The faucet is running. Constantly.

Through her entire wait, she doesn't see it go off. She thinks of how even a single drop of water every second adds up to gallons of water wasted over time. This isn't just a single drop though.

She has yet to hear of the innocuous but deadly term "running water dipper well."

The first time she notices this, she asks if they would turn it off. The employees flatly refuse, laugh, and give no reason. She leaves, unwilling to cause a scene. She hopes it goes away. The water runs and runs in her mind.

The second time, the problem hasn't gone away. She is more forceful. One of the workers refers her to the manager of the shift, who refers her to headquarters, where she can call. He says, "That's the orders from above. I'd get fired if I didn't follow them."

She finds it hard to believe that orders from above are forcing workers to run water constantly.

She speaks with headquarters. The man on the other end is friendly, but helpless. He even agrees with her. "Yes, I wish I could change the regulations. It's a waste of water," he says. "But Federal law states that we must keep our spoons in running water because we use dairy in our drinks, and the dairy can't contaminate other drinks. It's called the dipper well rule. They'd put us out of business."

So the chain of command goes, each section refusing to question the orders from above. This is how water gets wasted.

Out of curiosity, she decides to see whether this issue has ever been addressed. It seems ludicrous that water must be running nonstop on spoons for 5 business days a week, even in the midst of water shortages in California.

The only thing she can turn up is a small note in a 2004 memorandum by the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Division of Environmental Health: "It was of importance to a member of the Commission for Health Services that I remind everyone that dipper wells do not have to have constantly running water when empty-- only when they contain utensils. The issue of water conservation during drought and the desire to conserve water between meal service, [sic] prompted this reminder."

Of course, because this is not applicable to California specifically, she can only wring her hands in frustration. In juice bars across the nation, water is being forcibly wasted by the gallon, because those in the Food and Drug Administration are not creative enough to devise a more efficient solution for removing dairy bacteria from spoons.

It makes her wonder how many Federal regulations are promoting waste and inefficiency.

And with all that styrofoam lining already packed landfills, maybe it's time to start saying no to these places. Maybe it's time to start making our own smoothies (and coffee from cafés, we later discover), so that our vitamin-infused drinks aren't at the expense of vanishing water resources. Remember... it's your water too that's running down the drain.