Jesse Tiffen
Non-reusable water bottles are not only completely economically illogical, but also produce a plethora of social and environmental problems. No one ever considers the process behind producing plastic bottles.
Often, plastic water bottles are riddled with petrochemical toxins. We all want to drink the purest water we can get and may not trust tap water systems. However, why would we put such a “pure” substance into something with a high likelihood of leaking cancerous chemicals? Because it’s cheap, and as a society of apathetic consumers, we would rather close our eyes to reality, unaware that one-third of bottled water is simply packaged tap water.
Aquafina is one of many brands that do this, not to mention the other brands sold on campus. Water bottle corporations drain the water tables of communities that depend on springs for tap water. These communities are often left with either no water or contaminated water from these supposedly superior resources. There is no virgin spring in Maine with unspoiled wilderness spouting pristine liquid. That myth is merely a product of the manufactured demand of disingenuous marketing campaigns of conniving water bottle corporations. The American consumer is just as guilty.
Often, the idea of carrying a reusable bottle is foolishly rejected as inconvenient. I promise you will endure far greater atrocities in your lifetime than the supposed plight of refilling a reusable bottle. You are paying approximately 2,000 times the price for something you can get practically for free all over campus. Can you imagine paying 2,000 times the price for anything else? What about a $10,000 sandwich at Mom’s? I didn’t think so. Yet we somehow, as a campus, purchase almost 1,000 bottles every week.
No one in our society should have to buy bottled water unless tap water is truly unfit to drink. Within the context of The College of Wooster, our water is perfectly sufficient to drink, and everyone truly should take advantage of this privilege, one that much of the world doesn’t have.
In a time of climate change, instead of recognizing the preciousness of water, we deplete finite resources just to make it a commodity and ship it around the world.
Water is a transient and essential human right and it should not be made into a luxury. Not only do we exhaust 18 million barrels of oil every day just to send bottles all over the world, but also the amount of oil needed to make plastic water bottles each year is enough to fuel the equivalent of 1 million cars for one year.
Eighty percent of the waste created by bottles ends up in landfills, where it will either sit for thousands of years or be burned in an incinerator, releasing toxins into the air. Some of that waste often ends up floating around in oceans releasing more toxins into our ecosystem.
There are 3.5 million tons of plastic floating in our oceans –—roughly enough plasatic to cover the state of Texas. This is an environmental issue that should not even exist and could be easily fixed.
Those that make the decision to consume bottled water not only make themselves look like misinformed consumers, but they are also gradually ensuring and exacerbating climate change. To recycle plastic is simply not enough; it is time we took back the tap and change the habits of our society.