Moving
Away From Bottled Water
 When
students return to campus this year, they’ll
find Smith’s Dining Services at the leading edge of
a movement to wean Americans from bottled water, which is
frequently tap water that has been filtered.
Dining Services will distribute
Smith-blue water bottles complete with convenient carrying
loops and intended to replace bottled water at the newly
renovated Chapin Grab-and-Go dining site with “draft” water.
Here’s why: The
bottled water phenomenon is one of the most successful
marketing
campaigns ever devised. Although there are few places in
the United States where tap water is dangerous or unavailable,
and even though government quality standards are higher for
tap water than for bottled water, Americans have been cheerfully
paying up to 4,000 times the cost of tap water for the bottled
liquid. (Municipal water supplies are monitored regularly
and must meet high standards; bottled waters are not.)
As a result, in some states
and emerging countries, water tables have been reduced to
near-drought levels as international water companies draw
off millions of
gallons to package and ship elsewhere. Moreover, making plastic
bottles—usually in China—and shipping them all
over the world to meet the U.S. demand for bottled water
requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough
to fuel 100,000 cars for a year.
Each bottle is stenciled
with the Smith logo and the reminder "(You) I Must Recycle." |
In spite of recycling efforts,
more than 60 million plastic bottles end up in landfills
and incinerators every day. They bob along in our oceans
and find their way to beaches around the world, either whole,
as trash, or more insidiously worn down to small pieces that
are ingested by marine life and permanently clog animals’ digestive
tracts.
So every time you use that snappy new Smith-blue water bottle,
tell yourself how smart you are to save money and resources
simply by turning the tap and using safe, local water.
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