2008 Woodie Awards
Water, water, everywhere- especially landfills
Laura Weeks
Issue date: 4/24/08 Section: Op/Ed
Enjoy a bottle of pure enriched oxygen-available in Mountain Mint, Tropical Breeze, Citrus Blast, Polar Rush and a host of other flavors.
This marketing scheme sounds absurd, right? Who would purchase a natural commodity that is already available in abundance, and made pure and safe due to our hard earned tax dollars? The answer is just about every convenience-obsessed individual with a disposable income, and unfortunately you and I probably fit into this category. Companies like BetterThanAir and Oxygen+ simply have to mirror the multi-billion dollar bottled water industry to successfully commodity and privatize a natural resource at the expense of local democratic control and ecosystem.
However, the problem with bottled water runs much deeper than price premiums of up to a thousand times the cost of tap water and corporate commodification of a life-giving resource that we should have a right to. The marketing spin has led consumers to believe that bottled water is safer and tastes better than water from the faucet.
The truth of the matter is that the federal government imposes more stringent safety standards upon municipal tap water than those for the bottled counterpart. Certainly the arsenic, microbe, toxins, pollutants, and leached plastic chemicals that have turned up in various bottled brands can't possibly taste better. Besides, up to forty percent of bottled water, including Muhlenberg's beloved PepsiCo Aquafina is merely filtered tap water.
We also must evaluate the plethora of environmental problems that production and distribution creates. Last year the U.S. alone used more than seventeen million six hundred thousand barrels of oil and spewed two million five hundred thousand tons of carbon dioxide in the production of bottled water. The plastic itself is also problematic since eighty six percent of bottles wind up in the garbage instead of being recycled. From there they are either incinerated releasing toxic by products into the air or wind up in landfills.
So now we must ask ourselves, "Why does Muhlenberg, a school which has already embraced so many greening initiatives like recycling and purchasing local organic food, support all of this by keeping the coolers and vending machines stocked full of Aquafina?" The sole reason why environmental organizations on campus have failed to eradicate the school's purchase of bottled water is not because Sodexo won't agree to it, but rather because Muhlenberg students have demonstrated negative feedback to the initiative. So why are we supporting this nonsense? Muhlenberg College needs to change its ways.
This marketing scheme sounds absurd, right? Who would purchase a natural commodity that is already available in abundance, and made pure and safe due to our hard earned tax dollars? The answer is just about every convenience-obsessed individual with a disposable income, and unfortunately you and I probably fit into this category. Companies like BetterThanAir and Oxygen+ simply have to mirror the multi-billion dollar bottled water industry to successfully commodity and privatize a natural resource at the expense of local democratic control and ecosystem.
However, the problem with bottled water runs much deeper than price premiums of up to a thousand times the cost of tap water and corporate commodification of a life-giving resource that we should have a right to. The marketing spin has led consumers to believe that bottled water is safer and tastes better than water from the faucet.
The truth of the matter is that the federal government imposes more stringent safety standards upon municipal tap water than those for the bottled counterpart. Certainly the arsenic, microbe, toxins, pollutants, and leached plastic chemicals that have turned up in various bottled brands can't possibly taste better. Besides, up to forty percent of bottled water, including Muhlenberg's beloved PepsiCo Aquafina is merely filtered tap water.
We also must evaluate the plethora of environmental problems that production and distribution creates. Last year the U.S. alone used more than seventeen million six hundred thousand barrels of oil and spewed two million five hundred thousand tons of carbon dioxide in the production of bottled water. The plastic itself is also problematic since eighty six percent of bottles wind up in the garbage instead of being recycled. From there they are either incinerated releasing toxic by products into the air or wind up in landfills.
So now we must ask ourselves, "Why does Muhlenberg, a school which has already embraced so many greening initiatives like recycling and purchasing local organic food, support all of this by keeping the coolers and vending machines stocked full of Aquafina?" The sole reason why environmental organizations on campus have failed to eradicate the school's purchase of bottled water is not because Sodexo won't agree to it, but rather because Muhlenberg students have demonstrated negative feedback to the initiative. So why are we supporting this nonsense? Muhlenberg College needs to change its ways.