College students push to restrict bottled water

By Jenna Johnson, Published: April 30

Bottled water: It’s a vending machine’s healthy alternative to sugary soda, a convenient way to hydrate on the go and, lately, a total faux pas on many college campuses.

Some environmentally gung-ho students are not only glaring at those who choose to chug from disposable bottles — rather than earthy-friendly reusable containers — they are also pushing for restrictions on bottled water sales on campus.

At the University of Maryland College Park, students have persuaded the undergraduate and graduate student governments to stop buying bottled water for their meetings and events. Now they serve large pitchers of tap water.

Washington University in St. Louis has adopted an all-out ban in the hope of alleviating the waste going into landfills. The president of University of Mary Washington in Virginia forbade spending school funds on bottled water. Goucher College in Baltimore removed bottled water from its dining halls and campus eateries, but not its bookstore and vending machines.

Proposed restrictions often are met with opposition and caution. Some administrators say they want to avoid discouraging water consumption, especially when students can become dehydrated while playing intramural sports (or drinking games). And there’s the ongoing fight against the Freshman 15: If a student is standing at a vending machine, a bottle of water is usually the least-fattening option.

“It’s definitely a complex issue,” said Aynsley Toews, coordinator of the U-Md. Office of Sustainability and a member of a task force looking at other possible restrictions. Already the group has heard concerns about the university losing money from bottled water sales and not keeping its students properly hydrated. “Then there’s flavored water, there’s vitamin water. What do you do with those?”

Similar concerns are echoed by the industry. “You are telling people not to drink water? Holy mackerel,” said Tom Lauria, a spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association. “It’s odd that colleges would look to ban a healthy, legal product.”

Even some environmentalists worry bans could alienate students who are just starting to warm to eco-friendly ideas such as running fewer loads of laundry. When DePauw University in Indiana contemplated a bottle ban in 2010, an opposition group popped up on Facebook, where one student wrote, “guess the next logical thing is to make meatless mondays official. this is ridiculous.”

Americans purchased 8.45 billion gallons of bottled water in 2009. Environmentalists say resources are wasted on producing and transporting bottles of water when most people could receive the same product — for far less money — from their kitchen faucet. Each year about 50 billion water bottles end up in landfills, according to estimates.

Rallying against bottled water has become a cause for college environmental groups in the past few years, especially with the popularity of “Tapped,” a documentary about the bottled water industry.

While bans remain controversial, many colleges are instead trying to make it easier for students to pick refillable bottles over throwaway ones. They are also educating students about recycling and how their several-bottles-a-day habit quickly piles up in a landfill.

Often that means building a giant sculpture made up of thrown-away water bottles. At Maryland, a group of students spent two hours pulling bottles out of trash cans to construct its five-foot-tall plastic statue of a water bottle. At Penn State University, students opted to spell out the word “NO” in collected bottles. (Lauria and water bottle proponents, meanwhile, note that their bottles are the single most recycled item in curbside programs.)

Many schools have also installed “refilling stations” that filter tap water and are easier to use than traditional water fountains. The University of the District of Columbia is in the process of installing “hydration stations” in all of its buildings, while American University is upgrading 100 water fountains to include a bottle-friendly faucet.

American also gives each incoming student a free, reusable water bottle at orientation, and a few times a year the sustainability director hosts a blind-taste test of an array of water options — including tap, filtered and several bottled varieties. The goal is not to limit the number of options students have, but to make reusable bottles the hippest choice, said Chris O’Brien, American’s director of sustainability.

“It’s cool to have a refillable water bottle,” he said. “It’s not cool to be seen with a product that produces greenhouse gases and is not sustainable.”

Drowning in #Bottled water

from an article at CBS news

Americans buy, consume, and throw away the equivalent of nearly 100 billion 12-ounce plastic bottles of water every year, according to Dr. Gleick's calculations. That translates into roughly 300 bottles for every man, woman, and child. Laid end to end, these bottles would circle the earth more than 600 times - or reach from the earth to the moon and back 30 times.

On Passion, the Heart and Water

Over the weekend I was at a 5Rhythms dance class and the teacher left us with the question: "What are you passionate about?" I was thinking about it this morning. Am  I passionate about water filters? Water bottles? No, not really. I would prefer a world where there were neither; where there was an environment so pristine and water so available that we could simply dip a hand into a lake or a stream to take a drink.

I know that is not here, and that it is never going to happen. So I watch my passion shift a little bit, as it aligns with reality. Not a huge shift. Not even a stretch of the imagination. Simply a world where there is no such thing as disposable plastic. No bags and bottles in great islands in the ocean. No beaches covered in old thongs and screw caps. No storm water drains filled with garbage bags, styrofoam cups and fragments of clear, shiny PET. Not a huge stretch of the imagination, but a shift from our reality. And the sadness of those images mixed with the silliness of its cause -  (convenience mostly; a way of "saving" a few seconds; or a way, teen-like, to unleash some pent up power by not just giving a shit) - that mixture becomes volatile in my belly and ignites the sense of fire, and justice, and fairness, and caring for others that I CAN call passion. It brings the warmth of a broken heart into focus, the way that watching a beloved in pain does.

This earth is my mother, and my beloved. She is all abundant, all suffering, never complaining. But she is like a mother with wayward children who hit her, abuse her, steal from her, knock her down and piss on her. Stopping the use of plastic bottles does not seem like much, in the face of this, but it is a move in the right direction. There is an energy behind it that can carry more than its own weight. It makes a real difference, it makes an idealistic difference. But mostly, it makes a difference in my heart - in my way of being with my world.



This, I realize, is what I am passionate about: my heart's place in relation to my world. So why use plastic bottles to carry this passion? Convenience really - there is simply no more ridiculously easy target, no more invasive, below-the-radar, yet obvious symbol for how to cock up the planet, and through that to lose my connection with my heart and my passion. Not the life I want, just for the "ease" of a throw away bottle.

Great Australian Tap Water - get the real thing.

Dipak Ramsey

photo from 'La Diva de la Telephono Blanco'