First ever water bottle Ban on sales: In the News

Concord, MA recently became the first of 100s of municipalities across the USA to enact legislation which will ban the sale of plastic water bottles. Cities such as San Franciso, Miami and Chicago have already past legislation which prevents government purchases of plastic water bottles, and other cities like Boston have pledged to phase out city use of plastic water bottles. Concord however, has the distinction of being the first municipality with an outright ban on the sale of water bottles, which officially takes effect in January 2011. According to the Container Recycling Institute, a Washington-based group that monitors the recycling of bottles, 88 percent of plastic water bottles in the USA are not recycled, amounting to approximately 30 million bottles a day! Not only do our landfills reach capacity due to the recycling (or not) rate, but the amount of fossil fuels needed to transport the bottles around the country, as well as the fuel needed to produce the plastic which the bottles are made out of, is criminal. According to FoodandWaterWatch.org, producing these bottles requires the equivalent amount of oil to power 250,000 homes or fuel 100,000 cars for a year. This bottled water by the way, isn’t regulated and is often the very same water that comes out of the tap where it is bottled! As we watch these past few weeks in growing horror, as the ocean “bleeds” over 200,000 gallons of oil a day – oil we need to feed our fossil fuel addiction – we should applaud Concord and consider other ways we can reduce our dependence and use of fossil fuels. Interestingly enough, some high end restaurants like Del Posto in NYC, which used to serve “designer” bottled water, are now serving only the finest water, good old fashion NYC tap water.