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August 20, 2007

Opinion

BY THE NUMBERS
Drink water, but don't be a drip
Buying H2O by the bottle is costly, unnecessary, harms environment

Drinking water is good. Drinking it from plastic bottles that wind up wasting energy and clogging landfills? Not so good.

Despite the health benefits of staying refreshed, gulping high-priced bottled water and throwing the container away doesn't make sense for the environment or the economy. But a recent backlash against bottled water shouldn't detract from the larger issue: How to reduce or, at least, recycle the copious amounts of trash Americans generate every year.

Recently, the mayors of several major cities have been campaigning against bottled water. They're complaining that the industry has conned consumers into believing their product is superior to regular tap water that costs far less.

Los Angeles and San Francisco have recently banned city-funded purchases of bottled water, and Chicago may soon follow suit. New York has started a campaign called "Get Your Fill" that provides residents with a re-usable stainless steel cup for free if they pledge not to buy water in plastic bottles.

Several companies that sell bottled water with names that evoke exotic locales have admitted they use the same municipal sources that supply your kitchen sink and backyard garden hose. More troubling is that bottled waters are often transported over long distances in refrigerated trucks that waste fuel and pollute the air.

Despite those problems, consumers are more than willing to pay a premium for the convenience of bottled water, and consider it a no-calorie substitute for ubiquitous sugary drinks that have been linked to diabetes and obesity.

Instead of merely singling out the bottled water industry, however, figuring out how to make recycling more widespread is a better approach.

For example, most household products are packaged in recyclable plastic containers which later become raw materials for other consumer goods. But according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, only about a third of all eligible waste that we produce annually gets recycled, including a measly 34 percent of plastic soft drink bottles. In a country that creates more than 245 million tons of garbage a year — the equivalent of 4.5 pounds a day for every man, woman and child — there's plenty of room for improvement.

A recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office made sound recommendations for ramping up recycling, including establishing a nationwide public education campaign and requiring manufacturers to adopt "take back" programs to shift the burden of recycling from the public to the private sector. The agency also called for a national bottle bill enabling all beverage containers to be returned for money, starting at least at 10-cents per bottle.

In the absence of new government programs, Americans can make a splash by using fewer plastic containers and recycling as much possible. Whether or not you give up bottled water, we can all drink to that.

— Lyle V. Harris, for the editorial board

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/08/19/bottled_0820.html