Author: Ellis Raskin
Fact: Americans love bottled water. They love it so much that according to the International Bottled Water Association, Americans bought more bottled water than beer or coffee in 2005. That’s saying something – especially considering that this February, Los Angeles was judged to have the tastiest tap water in the world. I guess you just can’t beat the convenience of being able to take water with you. But why hasn’t anyone stopped to consider the environmental consequences of drinking so much bottled water? Don’t you realize that plastic will never decompose? Lets examine this matter in a little more detail.
Water is unquestionably one of our most valuable natural resources. Did you know that according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 89 percent of all water used in Los Angeles County is transported here from a different part of the state? Oh yeah, and we just happen to be in the middle of a drought. When it comes to ecological sustainability, water bottles do little to help. Pablo Paster, a sustainability engineer at Cal Poly Pomona, estimates that a 1 liter plastic water bottle uses between 3 and 5 liters of water in its manufacturing process. Additionally, The Earth Policy Institute claims that Americans consume over 28 billion water bottles every year (and eighty percent of those end up in landfills) – given these statistics, it is safe to say that bottled water is a wasteful industry.
The production of plastic water bottles isn’t doing much to help the oil crisis either. Peter Gleick, a water policy expert and director from the Pacific Institute from Oakland, California says that if you take into account the amount of oil necessary in the production of plastic water bottles, it would be as if you filled a quarter of every bottle with oil. Water bottles are also only the tip of the iceberg. Think how many other thousands of beverages are bottled in plastic.
Here’s my question—why is it so hard to reuse your old water bottles? If we took away all the recycling bins across campus, would people be more inclined to reuse their old beverage bottles? Probably not. I ascribe Americans’ wasteful behaviors to simple ignorance; they simply do not understand the implications of their actions. So here’s what we need to do: let’s all agree to go out and buy ourselves reusable bottles, and stop being so wasteful. It’s really not that hard. We need to stop being blind to our future as a humanity, and use some common sense!
Ellis Raskin is a junior Philosophy major. He can be reached at eraskin@oxy.edu.
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