A BAN ON BOTTLED WATER?......?!

I recently read a similar article, but the intent wasn’t portrayed quite the same way.

This collection of mayors aren’t trying to ban bottled water. They’re just intending to stop purchasing it with their cities’ money. Bottled water would still be available, it’s just that the cities wouldn’t contract to purchase it.

There are some very good reasons for doing this. You bring up the issue of contamination. You’re absolutely right that contamination is a concern. But did you know that most cities’ public water supplies are controlled much more stringently than commercial water? Check out this article from Business Week. It wasn’t all that long ago (six months, maybe?) that I read about a bottled water that was being recalled because of bacterial growth in the bottles. (Sorry...I tried to remember the brand and I looked around for an article about it, but I didn’t have any luck.)

Another good reason is an environmental one. The plastic from water bottles is filling our landfills...and it doesn’t break down. Of course, many people recycle their empty bottles, but I’d venture a guess that just as many aren’t recycled. As you said, bottled water has a great convenience factor, so many times when you’re out with a bottle of water, you don’t have a recycling receptacle handy. Then there’s the cost of distribution, both financial and environmental. You’ll have to trust me when I say that I could be so much more environmentally conscious than I really am, but this seems like such a simple way of lightening the load on our planet.

And what I think is probably the best reason? Money. City water costs only a fraction of what commercial water costs. (The Business Week article states the cost difference is as much as 4000%.) If a city purchases bottled water for its employees or buildings, who pays for it? Your taxes. And mine. And I don’t know about you, but I can think of far better ways for my city to spend my taxes!

My take? I’m all for it. This initiative wouldn’t prevent you from purchasing bottled water, and it wouldn’t prevent, say, a city employee from bringing their own from home. You just wouldn’t go to a city function and see bottles of water sitting out on a table for people to grab...instead, you’d see a pitcher of ice water. Minneapolis has already started doing something like this, and even though I read the Minneapolis paper regularly, I’ve never seen anyone writing in to complain about the policy. (I double checked their letter archives since Saturday, when the article I linked above ran, and didn’t see it mentioned.) I used to live there, though, and the city’s water tastes remarkably pure, so that may have something to do with it.

So maybe that’s a solution. Instead of a city spending money on purchasing bottled water for its employees, the city could shunt those tax revenues into improvements on the city water supply. Then everyone would benefit. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ll still occasionally buy bottled water, but I don’t see any harm in this initiative at all.

In terms of landfill or recycling for all those empty bottles. Then there's cost of transportation, pollution resulting from that transportation, and the production of the plastic bottles (which are themselves a petroleum derivative, I believe).
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On the other hand, choosing bottled water over soft drinks or any of that other bottled cr*p is definitely better on the health side.
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But remember that a large proportion of bottled water is already filtered city water, so those Rx drugs may still be there. Check the source statements carefully.

Bottled water is actually ridiculous, the amount of work and plastic and nasty chemicals that goes into making this, shipping this, and get rid of it is incredible.
It's actually a 2000 times more expensive then tap water depending on the brand of water you drink.
Why couldn't there just be a lot more drinking fountains or people filling their bottles home?

If there would be an emergency, then yes, people could receive bottled water but only then.
Only in countries with bad water quality should have bottled water.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se12y9hSOM0

but its so much nicer!

Presumably, all bets are off during disasters.

The problem is that plastic water bottles are a huge pollution problem during the 99.99999% of the time that things aren’t disasters. They don’t degrade, so they’re there forever. They can be recycled, and many people do, but a lot of other people just drop them on the ground. That wouldn’t be a serious hazard if it were just a few people, but over time they accumulate because they never go away.

So you can see why mayors are frustrated, since it’s their cities and towns that are saddled with the responsibility for cleaning the bottles up.

Fast-food restaurants have switched to biodegradable packaging for most of their other items, but that wouldn’t work for something that has to be water-tight. We actually encourage people to drink water, and they should, but the bottles will become a nuisance if we don’t restrict them.

Banning them outright is probably overkill, but it would be good to find less egregious ways to regulate them. I like the idea of requiring conferences to put out washable glasses.

A tax might be an even better approach. A five-cent bottle tax would pay for cleanup, and encourage people to use reusable bottles instead. A "deposit" is probably more of a nuisance than they want to deal with, but it might be another effective approach. That more accurately internalizes the external cost of cleaning up for the water bottles.

Get this. This is from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, by Joe Soucheray. "US mayors, having solved all other problems, resolved at their annual conference, in Miami, to stop providing bottled water for employees and guests. ... 250 mayors [are] signing on to sing the praises of their own municipal water systems while also sheepishly having to confess that's where bottled water probably comes from in the first place," and we've had the stories. Can we trace the beginnings of this, this bottled water thing? This is classic. This is just classic the way the left works.

First they tell us that the water coming out of the tap will kill us. There's lots of germs and amoebas and scum floating around in there, and the city water treatment plants are not doing their job. It's really bad out there, and then after that here comes bottled water. And it comes from places like France and all these artesian springs, from these glaciers in the Alps from all over the world, beautiful labels.

Fiji. By the way, the Fiji water guy has big bucks, lives here in Palm Beach. Damn straight. The Fiji water guy is right up the road here. Any rate, so we're told to drink the bottled water, and then we're told we're not drinking enough for good health. "But don't drink out of the tap because that's got amoebas and scum, and you never know what's in there. You can see some of the scum floating around and amoebas swimming. You can't drink that. You gotta drink the bottled water. They don't tell you not putting fluoride in the bottled water therefore your kids and your cavities increase, as do the trips to the dentists." And we keep drinking the stuff and drinking the stuff and drinking the stuff, and then we learn that a lot of these bottled water companies are just kind of putting the bottles under the tap from the municipal system and mixing it with the so-called water from the ancient spring that's unpolluted and untouched by humanity and other habitats. And then, then we find out that the bottles are causing global warming!

Then we find out that the bottles are polluting and destroying landfills and they're killing animals that try to eat them. And then we find out the bottles are made from oil: plastics, petroleum-related products. Then we're told the tap water... Now, all this takes years. Then we're told the tap water is actually cleaner than the stuff in the bottles. And we're also told... By the way, a gallon of bottled water is ten times that of a gallon of gas, or five times, or what have you. Now we're told the bottled water stinks, it's polluting everything, it's causing global warming, pollution, all kinds of things, rotten. It's not any different than what came out of the tap. So now these mayors get together and they start banning bottled water in their municipalities while at the same time touting the use of water from their own municipalities, to get the water rates back up. This is just classic. They take something, they start it out as a health issue, and it transforms into a global warming environmental issue, then it becomes global warming environmental destructive. Now we have to ban it.