International Bottled Water Association letter to the editor

I guess we ruffled someone's feathers at the International Bottled Water Association, "the trade association representing the bottled water industry. Founded in 1958, IBWA's membership includes U.S. and international bottlers, distributors and suppliers." Tom Lauria has written a letter to the editor of The Daily Collegian decrying our effort to get Penn State to ban the sale of single-use plastic water bottles by ceasing the Aquafina portion of its Pepsi contract. Lauria writes:

The Oct. 15 article "Group asks PSU to eliminate bottled water" is an imbalanced and often incorrect missive against bottled water and deserves and requires some fact checking.

Tough FDA regulations of what constitutes purified water indicates it is not the same as tap water.

As for the high price cited in his article, anyone at Penn State is free to buy their bottled water in bulk, like most Americans.

A case of 24 single-serve bottles of water costs about $4 these days. These refreshing and portable beverages are just the ticket for people-on-the-go seeking to avoid colorings, calories, chemicals and sweeteners found in other packaged beverages.

Especially at Penn State, where campus recycling rates top national averages, properly disposing of the empty bottles is an easy task, as easy as recycling thousands of similarly packaged foods, health and cleaning products, and other PET plastic containers.

Everything needs to be recycled -- why single-out bottled water, the healthiest beverage of all? Tap water will always hold an important place in our society, from sanitation to irrigation. But not everyone enjoys the smell or taste of chlorine. Still others enjoy the crisp, slightly mineral flavor of some natural bottled waters.

The issue at hand is consumer choice and campus groups owe it to everyone to respect that.

Suffice it to say that this is the kind of response we can expect from repackaging apologists and water profiteers: choice. Methinks there is something rotten in Denmark.

I have written a letter of response to the Collegian's editor which I will post later pending its publication with other thoughts. I encourage you to also send letters.

But really: Refill. Not landfill.

Our Take Back the Tap day of action

Yesterday we worked to Take Back the Tap at Penn State. We were one of about eleven colleges and universities working with Food and Water Watch to achieve bottle-free campuses. According to a Food and Water Watch press release yesterday,

“Food & Water Watch is delighted to collaborate with these schools to help them get the word out that bottled water is a waste of money and natural resources, and a blight on the environment,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “The Campus Day of Action is significant in that it connects the individual efforts of each student group to a broader movement, and illustrates that resistance to bottled water is not only a local issue, but a full-fledged, national trend.”

Institutions participating in Food & Water Watch’s Campus Day of Action included: American University, Arizona State University, Chico State University, Cornell University, Duke University, Humboldt State University, Northern Arizona University, Pennsylvania State University, Portland State University, St. Mary’s College, and the University of Washington. While activities to promote the day of action varied, highlights included the installation of bottle-free water stations, tap water versus bottled water taste tests, drives to eliminate bottled water from campuses, and screenings of the documentary films Blue Gold and FLOW: For Love of Water.

In some cases, activism extended beyond campus to the broader community. Such was the case at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, where students appealed to local administrators to ban the purchase of bottled water with municipal funds.

On Monday evening I (Peter Buckland - president of 3E-COE) briefly spoke at the State College Borough Council meeting asking them to consider eliminating their purchase of bottled water with municipal funds. I justified it to them as part of their commitment to be a Climate Protection Community in their Resolution 944. They were polite. Though I can't speak too strongly, State College mayoral candidate Elizabeth Goreham has indicated that she is in favor of this idea. One audience member spoke to me afterward and said that "I couldn't agree with you more about what you said." Our goal is in the public consciousness.

Last night we also screened Blue Gold: World Water Wars for a crowd of about 50. The film went over quite well and we had a discussion afterward led by Prof. Robert Brooks (Geography and the Cooperative Wetlands Center) and Lydia Vandenberg (Sustainability Officer at the Office of Physical Plant). People in the audience were particularly interested in how Penn State can continue to be a more water-efficient institution in all of its aspects - from curriculum to operations to consumption.

They were asked about what future teachers could do. We can ally ourselves with knowledgeable people. We can change our habits. Dr. Brooks, quoting the movie said, "You can simply ask questions." Ms. Vandenberg agreed and encouraged people to look into the life cycle of their products and proceeded to walk the audience through the hidden water and petroleum costs of water bottle fabrication.

As current and future teachers, I think the film provided a kind of educative experience that John Dewey would approve of. It looked to the past and asked us to perform an intelligent and critical inquiry and it then offered us the hope for meaningful experiences in the future about which we could further reflect. Best of, it called upon our personal and collective moral agency. Finally, we hoped to foster within those present a sense that we are not just pecuniary agents for a market economy, but rather individuals with profound senses of the good, the beautiful, and the wise. Bottled water and its side effects are neither good, nor beautiful, nor wise.

What about our local press? The Daily Collegian covered us. What did we say?

The average American drinks 224 bottles of water at a typical price of $1.50 per 16 ounces, the group said. By switching to tap water, which costs $.002 per gallon, consumers can save $335.55 per year, said 3E-COE member Kevin May (freshman-film).

"For Penn State in particular, it isn't so bad, but what you find is that we have a 53 percent recycling rate," said 3E-COE President Peter Buckland (graduate-educational theory and policy). "That is really good by national standards, but still -- more than 40 percent is going to landfills. It's unintelligent and sort of immoral."

Rhianna Stockbridge (sophomore-secondary education) a member of 3E-COE, said most students don't realize what they have at Penn State.

"At Penn State, there is clean drinking water in the toilets on campus, and other countries don't even have drinking water," she said. "It's not a matter of convenience to spend over $300 a year on bottled water."

Yes, we want Penn State to cease its contract with Pepsi for the sale of Aquafina here. And yesterday we talked to a lot of people and collected lots of signatures asking the university to do just that.

We the undersigned believe that Penn State should cease buying and selling single-use plastic water bottles immediately. The detrimental costs associated with single-use bottles are numerous.

Single-use plastic water bottles contribute to solid waste pollution when they aren’t recycled; they contribute to climate change in all parts of their lifecycle from fabrication, to distribution, to disposal; they needlessly transform a public resource into a for-profit venture at an exorbitant rate – hundreds or thousands of times the price of municipal water. Finally, the EPA’s standards on municipal drinking water are more stringent than those of the FDA which regulate bottled water.

Continuing to carry single-use plastic bottles is socially and personally irresponsible. As people drinking water from the Spring Creek watershed we urge you to cease the Aquafina contract with Pepsi and move us bottle free!!!

If you are a Penn State student, faculty, or staff who is interested in signing a petition, contact one of the blog authors or go to the HUB on a Friday. Our brother/sister group, Eco-Action has them at their table on the ground floor. Help us Take Back the Tap!

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.

Tapped the Movie

Like Food, Inc. recently did for American industrial agriculture, Tapped examines the economic, social, and environmental effects of another destructive industry - water. But Tapped zeroes in on the ruin visited upon us and ecosystems by the globalized supply chain and its commodification in single-use bottles. The makers of Who Killed the Electric Car? and I.O.U.S.A. ask us to consider a very pointed question: "Is access to clean drinking water a human right, or a commodity that should be bought and sold like any other article of commerce?" That's a loaded question.

The net effects of this seemingly innocuous little thing are disastrous. In the United States we sell 29 billion single-use plastic bottles annually. "In a time when we're looking at climate change, why are we shipping water around the world?" Why are we perpetuating an industry whose end product leads to 3.5 million tons of plastic trash in the north Pacific Ocean expanding over 9,000 football fields worth of area?

We need to change this system, and Tapped gives us more fodder. Where does your money go when you buy Dasani, Aquafina, Poland Spring, Fiji, or Arrowhead? In a nation as rich as ours, with as rich a water system as we have, why spend billions upon billions of dollars playing a water shipping shell game when we could be investing a fraction of that money into riparian systems' health, river and lake health, and ocean health? Why not update and secure our water supplying infrastructure for the long-term health of our people?



But it's also personal. Can you use less water? If you can, can your friends and family? What alternatives are there to corporate private water? How can we change what we do to be more sustainable people?

Can you be more mindful? Of course you can.

As a first step, you can go to the Tapped website and sign their declaration which begins, "By signing this declaration I promise to limit my consumption of bottled water..." Join me.

It is time for you and me to Take Back the Tap!

Hear that whistling? That's the sound of water bottle demand plummeting.

What's happening to bottled water as demand falls? The price is plummeting.

So says The Wall Street Journal (subscription needed for full text).

Bottled-water makers have stepped up a months-long price war this summer to win back customers who have turned on the tap to save money and reduce environmental waste.

This month, PepsiCo Inc.'s Aquafina brand sold at some grocery stores for as little as $2.99 for a 24-pack of half-liter bottles -- less than a penny an ounce and about half of its typical price. Still, that wasn't as cheap as the private-label brand at supermarket chain Kroger Co., on sale for $2.49.

So they are dumping someone else's water on the market to get rid of a surplus they never should have gotten anyway. Sometimes this system just makes me nuts.

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...

Facebook page for Take Back the Tap campaign!

If you are into it, join our Penn State Take Back the Tap Facebook campaign! Everybody's doing it!

Stewardship or Sacrifice?

Penn State's Center for Ethics and Religious Affairs is hosting a conference on religion and the ethics of climate change, titled Stewardship or Sacrifice? It goes from today to tomorrow (Oct. 8th and 9th). From the site:

"The purpose of the conference is to explore the role of religion in helping solve the climate change crisis. A panel of climate scientists will provide the latest understanding of how climate change impacts our world; theologians will reflect on the scriptural bases for ethics response; members from congregations across Pennsylvania will describe concrete actions that they have taken to reduce their carbon footprints, and workshops will focus on how Pennsylvania religious institutions can mitigate threats to human health and the environment from climate change.

Keynote addresses from the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, founder of Interfaith Power and Light, and Michael E. Mann, a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report, will detail the scope of the ethical challenges we face and the urgency of immediate action to build a more sustainable future. The conference invites wide participation from members of Pennsylvania faith communities interested in responding to climate change or simply learning more about this issue. For more information on the conference contact Jonathan E. Brockopp, Department of History and Religious Studies.

This conference is part of a week-long series of events at Penn State, including a co-sponsored conference on "Educating for Sustainability" October 5 and 6, 2009, at Medlar Field at Lubrano Park, organized by theSchreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, Schreyer Honors College, theCenter for Sustainability, and theRock Ethics Institute."

If you have time check it out please. I think that one of the things that we need to recognize is the sheer power of some portions of the religious community in American life. If we want to take meaningful action to curb climate change and reduce some of the potentially catastrophic change then we are going to have to work with and within our faith communities to do more and do better. This includes churches, mosques, temples, etc. reducing their carbon footprints through reduction and retrofitting their operations. These can come about through the investment of time and money by the congregation in new technologies and pledging to reduce their own consumption for ethical and theological reasons.

Additionally, this can mean actively engaging the most corrosive brands of anti-reason climate change denying sects among us. As many of you know, I am an avid follower and opponent of the creationist movement in the United States. The Venn Diagram of creationists and climate change deniers overlaps too much. To my mind, there is an urgent call for the Christian faithful who understand the science of climate change to engage, educate, and persuade the deniers among them that they need to change as well. The status quo cannot stand.

As we have seen with other big social movements - notably the abolition and civil rights movement - religion CAN play a very constructive role. Until now, it has been lagging behind on this most crucial of issues. Will the religious communities help us? Or will too many continue to hinder the greatest transformation our country has ever needed to make? This conference might bring us some hope.

Blue Gold: October 14th

3E-COE is proud to host Sam Bozzo's Blue Gold

Please join our viewing and discussion of the film
on Wednesday, October 14 at 8 PM, 112 Chambers.

Update: We will be hosting a brief panel discussion following the film. Robert Burkholder (Prof of English with an emphasis on nature literature), Robert Brooks (Prof. of Geography with an emphasis on wetlands), and Lydia Vandenberg (OPP Sustainability Officer for Penn State) will discuss the film afterwards and take questions.




While we're at it: Print a flier!

Reminder: Educate for Sustainability