Little Plastic Bottles Everywhere

I live in the hot and arid Southwestern quadrant of this country, but I'm willing to bet that wherever you live, you and everyone else at this time of the year ambles around carrying at least one container of bottled water. For me it's a lifeline, and I usually carry a small cooler full of frozen bottles of water when venturing out on a round of errands, whether on foot, bike, or in the car. Yet, no other aspect of today's consumer culture may so signal our casual lack of awareness of multiple environmental factors as this ubiquitous obsessive toting of bottled water. This little article from Environmental News Service lays out some of those factors for us: Glug and Toss Water Bottles Clog Landfills Not only do the bottles clog our landfills, the bottles are yet one more example of our heedless dependence on oil:

Millions of tons of oil-derived plastics, mostly polyethylene terephthalate, PET, are used to make the water bottles, most of which are not recycled. Each year, about two million tons of PET bottles end up in landfills in the United States, Worldwatch estimates. In 2005, the national recycling rate for PET was only 23.1 percent, far below the 39.7 percent rate achieved a decade earlier.

Imagine that! We're using more, and recycling less - how clever, these humans, in every way!The article details several other factors most of us probably don't take into account when we crack open that designer water, among them this little nugget: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration permits bottled water to contain certain levels of fecal matter, whereas the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not allow any human waste in city tap water.

One US city mayor (yeah, you know it, it's that damned hippy city by the Bay, of course, San Francisco) is currently making headlines by curbing city monies being spent on bottled water for employees and events:

city departments, all city concessions, city-funded events and functions in city buildings will be prohibited from using city money to buy bottled water by July 1. By Dec. 1, all city departments located on city property must switch from bottled water dispensers to dispensers that attach to taps or water pipes and use water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. >

San Francisco joins LA as an officially bottled-waterless metropolis, LA having made this decision two years ago. The economic aspects of such a decision are probably higher up on the ladder of reasons to go for city tap water than environmental concerns, but we'll take what we can get. Interesting things are happening in New Mexico's water world, and I'm going to try to get some facts together to write about that next. In the meantime - check out these great eternally reusable bottles. I myself own two of them, and hereby vow to dig them out, start refilling them and toting them through this oven-world of a desert summer.

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bottled water, consumer waste, landfills, recycling, san francisco, tap water

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