And the movement just keeps getting bigger

Do you know how many people are fed up with bottled water? Millions. And lots of people are getting together in all kinds of configurations to do something about it.

Yes! Magazine has this feature:

Restaurants in California, Oregon, New York, Maine, and other states are serving only tap water. Students at Brown University were inspired to start Beyond the Bottle after Washington University in St. Louis ended sales of bottled water on its campus.

Seattle University and Gonzaga University in Washington state, and the University of Portland in Oregon, have also ended sales of bottled water. Multnomah County became the first county in Oregon to ban bottled water from county meetings and functions. Efforts to prevent a bottling company from extracting millions of liters of water from the local aquifer led the city of Bundanoon, Australia, to ban the sale and production of bottled water. Toronto, London, and other cities in Ontario, Canada as well as school boards in Ottawa and Waterloo have stopped the sale of bottled water in municipal facilities.

Bottled water is marketed as superior to tap, but public water supplies are actually cleaner, less expensive, and more environmentally responsible, according to organizations like Take Back the Tap, Food and Water Watch, and Stop Corporate Abuse. They are mounting campaigns to combat misconceptions caused by bottled-water marketing.

That's right. Take back that tap. In the near future, we'll be expanding our work on this with some film projects, a musical project, and other humorous theatrics. Stay tuned!

Bottle stations on the local nightly news and a story in the paper all in one day

Wow. When it rains, it really really pours...from our bottle-filling stations. Check out this piece on local WTAJ TV...

UNIVERSITY PARK, CENTRE COUNTY - Last year, Penn state installed its first water bottle filling station in the HUB Student Union, this year the school has added three more at Chambers Building, the Intramural Building, and Willard Building at University Park.

The university sells $2.7 million worth of bottled water each year, and is one of the first in the nation to offer this high tech thirst quenching technology.

“One of the most needless forms of waste that we have comes from non-reusable disposable plastic water bottles,” Peter Buckland, a PhD candidate at Penn State who helped spearhead the initiative to get the filling stations on campus, said.

...and then this piece in the Centre Daily Times.

“We are using this to investigate water bottle filling stations,” said Lydia Vandenbergh, program coordinator at the campus sustainability office. “We did some testing by the environmental health and safety group to make sure the stations would not be a breeding ground for bacteria.”

A club called 3e-coe, composed of education majors and self-proclaimed Earth lovers, had urged the Office of Sustainability to stop purchasing bottled water to sell on campus.

“The club was great. They were kind of the ones that came to university and said let’s ban water bottles,” said Vandenbergh. “The university spends about $2 million on water bottles in their contract with Pepsi. ... The club came to us with a black-and-white proposal, but we were able to work with them to find what’s the best for Penn State.”

Check out the comments on the CDT page too. Some of those are real keepers.

For the record, I think that Lydia Vandenberg and I should form a band about water. Name ideas?

It's not only about water.

Taking back the tap isn't only about securing water for communities and eliminating needless waste associated with bottled water. It's about public health and wellness. Several people have written to me and said, "I really appreciate what you are doing about bottled water. But I'm worried that people might shift to soda." This is a reasonable concern.

Now, Congress might step in to help with that too. NPR reports today,

Amid the health care overhaul debate, one big question has been where to come up with about $1 trillion in funding to change the system. One idea that has been suggested is a junk food tax — and, in particular, a tax on soda.

Public health advocates say drinking soda is directly linked to obesity, which is partly responsible for skyrocketing health care costs.

To my mind, this is an unequivocal good. It reduces processed sugar consumption and has the possibility of greater health and wellness. It could further reduce another kind of water commoditization (because what is soda besides processed sugar water?) and many of the same disastrous inputs and outputs associated with bottled water. Less petroleum use in bottle fabrication, distribution, and disposal.

Update from Sweden

Hi dear 3E-COE members and friends! I arrived two weeks ago in Uppsala, Sweden, where I'll be living for the next two years and finishing my studies long-distance. I'm sorry that I had to leave at the moment when the anti-disposable water bottle campaign has been heating up, but I'm thrilled to hear about all of the exciting developments and progress you've been making there!

Some of you may know of Sweden's record of being very progressive on the environmental concern/protection front. Well, reading about these developments from afar was great, but seeing many of them in action is even cooler. For example, in our apartment complex, we have recycling bins for plastics, metals, cardboard (paper must be brought to one of four municipal facilities), compost (yay!!), and trash, of course.

While all of these options are exciting, what blows me away the most is what happens to the trash. According to an excellent report of the city's developments, seventy percent of household waste gets converted into fuel for 50 city buses. Seventy percent!! The report also states that the facility that converts waste to fuel is being expanded so that 100% of the city's household trash can be used as fuel for public transit. Amazing, huh?

Something else that's quite exciting is how many people ride their bikes here and how the city accommodates/encourages cycling. For example, there are bike paths, many streets have dedicated bike lanes, and in some cases there are separate traffic signals for bicycles. Further, part of Uppsala's "Stop the Unnecessary 2.0" campaign includes encouraging individuals to bike to work. Other parts of that campaign include having e-meetings, keeping an eye on how much we print, turning off lights, etc.

If you have the time and interest, there are several pages in the report that focus on environmental efforts that the city is taking to make life in Uppsala more sustainable. It's mind blowing and very inspiring...seeing all of these efforts here reminds me of how much hope there is of similar amazing things happening in the U.S. In State College, we already have the awesome bike paths...

Plastic incineration costs?

What do plastics have to do with climate change?

We know that their production requires oil to make the plastic, using over 17 million barrels of oil. The industry that produces the plastic itself fuels its factories with coal. Shipment and distribution? More petroleum. Refrigeration in vending machines and other coolers? More coal-powered electricity combined with the coolant HFCs, greenhouse gases 140 to 11,000 times more heat-trapping than CO2. Disposal requires more shipment to landfills (only 14% of them excape landfills), recycling plants, or in some cases, downcycling where they can be turned into rugs or some such thing (for a fact sheet check and pdf Food and Water Watch). But there is more cost here too.

I've just been reading the EPA's 2007 Executive Summary on the release of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A good deal of the material is on consumption or coal, petroleum, and natural gas and their respective uses in different economic sectors (electricity production, transportation, etc.). If you are versed in climate change materials, there are no surprises in the broad findings - the United States has produced, is producing, and will continue to produce a disproportionate quantity of GHGs that affect the climate. The facts contained in the summary round out and fill in our pictures.

One of the most interesting things I found came under "Other significant CO2 trends." The EPA writes, "CO2 emissions from incineration of waste (20.8 Tg CO2 Eq. in 2007) increased by 9.8 Tg CO2 Eq. (90 percent) from 1990 through 2007, as the volume of plastics and other fossil carbon-containing materials in the waste stream grew. [emphasis mine]" We know that from 1990 to 2007 time single-use plastic water bottle use has at least doubled. World Watch reports that from 1997 to 2005 the market's volume doubled to 164 billion liters. PR Inside estimates that the volume will increase to over 174 billion liters in 2011, though public awareness campaigns, bans, and the economic downturn could disrupt this trend. Nonetheless, billions of single-use plastic water bottles in the U.S. have ended up in landfills. [Burned bottle image courtesy of IfEnergy.]

I wonder, then, what proportion of these landfill-bound bottles have been incinerated and been converted into yet more GHGs. I don't know. To some degree it doesn't really matter. The life cycle of the single-use plastic water bottle is so toxic that this just adds some further ugliness to what can only be described as an ecological and social cancer.

Where does our trash go?

The Boston Globe just published a story about how pieces of trash have been tracked to their final destination in the Greater Boston area and will soon be tracked in other cities. The tracking project, initiated by MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory, has been developed in the "hope that tracking the trash through the disposal system - and making it viewable in real time on a blog - will cause consumers to give more thought to what they are tossing out."

How cool! I've often wondered if one of the reasons why some people do not recycle had anything to do with the fact that what they throw out magically "disappears." Of course, we know that it doesn't magically disappear, as demonstrated by the giant plastic dump in the Pacific Ocean; however, for the vast majority of Americans, what we throw away is out of sight and out of mind. I hope this MIT project serves as a means for people to feel more responsible about what they throw at the Earth.

More reasons to discard the bottle?

As if we needed more...

The Discovery Channel has posted this:

"What we found was really surprising to us," Wagner said. "If you drink water from plastic bottles, you have a high probability of drinking estrogenic compounds."

The study adds to growing concerns about products that span the plastic spectrum, added Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in New York.

"This is coming at a good time because the use of bottles for consuming water is getting very bad press now because of its carbon footprint," she said. "It's just another nail in the coffin of bottled water, the way I see it."

PURE WASTE!

Update: Today I saw that people had been busy posting things around campus as well. I saw pamphlets at study tables and fliers on bulletin boards. Tomorrow I know that more of us will be out to push this a little bit more. We're tired but eager to see change. I actually think it might be good to drop some in faculty mailboxes of all things. I did it in EDTHP today. Maybe go to other departments and try it if you can afford to do it!

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Feel free to print it out and use it.

Post it around campus.

Post it on your door.

Give it to friends and talk to them about why we do this.

We do it because we know the costs...costs that have been hidden from us for profits made in the name of "convenience." It's a culture that comes from what Wendell Berry calls "a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom."

We are not deluded. We know that there is much work to be done and that what's on this flier is only the tip of the iceberg. It's a massive iceberg that presents our generation's and future generations' proverbial ship with disaster. So let's do this thing and ween ourselves off of this alleged convenience.

Let's do the right thing.

People Protecting Communities

In just a few weeks a representative from People Protecting Communities (PPC) will be coming to 3E-COE to talk to us about what they are doing to prevent a landfill from coming to Rush Township. Not just any landfill mind you, but the largest landfill east of the Mississippi River constructed by Resource Recovery LLC (RRLLC). Notice the green background at their website, an obvious ploy to play on the green as the coolest thing in marketing. The proposed site would go from 5,800 acres of mixed-use area and wilderness to a dump with an incinerator.

There is a recently added proposal to reconvert ten miles of rail-trail into an industrial rail line for waste disposal (pictured here). It would rip away a community-building asset for leisure, relaxation, and connection and turning it into a severing artery for the flow of thousands of tons of waste. The proposed train, as far as I understand it, would bring 55 rail cars of trash to the site 6 days a week. (People don't produce trash on Sundays?) What would that train look like?





That. Full of garbage. There are those who will say that trash has to go somewhere. True. But this is just another delay of the real problem of total waste. Endless packaging and endless throw-away culture and commodities. This is, to me, another side of the fight regarding disposable single-use water bottles. People need to reduce their waste outputs and saying "NO!" to this kind of land "development" is one way to start.

Here are PPC's 100 reasons to say no.If you're interested in learning more or joining this fight, visit their website or take action.

A nice brief on bottled water

Water Without Waste has a nice piece through a Comcast interview on why using disposable plastic water bottles is unsustainable. Simply put, "The total amount of energy embedded in our use of bottled water—including the energy to produce, fill, transport, chill, and dispose of the bottles can be as high as the equivalent of filling each plastic bottle one quarter full with oil.”

Water bottle update

Hi everyone! Thought I'd provide a brief update with what's happened since our water bottle demonstration on December 10.

Perhaps surprisingly, President Spanier responded within a week in regard to the letter we wrote to him. While his response did not contain the magical statement that he would consider issuing an executive order to ban plastic water bottles, he did put us in touch with people on campus who are interested in working with us to reduce waste on campus.

Just over a week ago, we met with some of these staff members to discuss the water bottle ban. The meeting went well, and we plan to keep up the pressure on President Spanier to be involved in what's going on. There are staff members on campus who want the ban to happen, but unless we keep up pressure on Old Main, this effort could fade into the woodwork. However, many of us are too determined to let this effort fall off the agenda, regardless of the challenges it involves.

I've been in touch with people at Washington University in St. Louis, a university which went water bottle free this semester. I learned that it took a summer and a semester for the ban to be implemented, so I'm optimistic that we can hope for a similar timeframe. I'll post updates again in a month or so, perhaps sooner.

I've also been in contact with individuals working for environmental non-profits who want to help us get water bottles banned at Penn State. It's amazing that from this one article, our cause has been spread to many others who are invested in similar efforts. In great numbers, we can do even greater things!

If anyone has any questions or suggestions, feel free to e-mail 3ECOE@psu.edu.