Put a Cap on It! - Install water bottle refill stations in downtown Skagway

Goals

• Reduce disposable bottle usage in Skagway
• Implement water bottle refill stations around town
• These refill stations would be placed in public facilities such as the parks, visitor center, and city hall
• Educate the general public on the harms of bottled water

Hello my name is Al Weber, and I am here to talk about the very serious, very real problem of all bottled water. The mountains of plastic are getting higher and higher and we need to climb to the top to stop ourselves before these pinnacles tumble down. We’re a culture of consumers. Most of the time the items or things we buy or feel we need are completely worthless and irrelevant. Bottled water is a purchase that is already available to us for practically free yet we continue to endanger our future existence by buying it. In our current consumerist society we as United States citizens must realize the harms of bottled water for our world and convince our government to take action and, like cigarettes and alcohol, ban disposable water bottles from public areas. With the rising issue of climate change water scarcity is becoming a serious issue. Who has the right to fresh water? Who owns water? How do we reasonably drink bottled water from Fiji when millions of people around the world have no access to any fresh water? As we discover the truths of disposable bottles we will examine how the removal of these from society would benefit the environment, your pocketbooks, and your health.
Coming back to Ethos Water, their marketing strategy is a tried and true one that emphasizes all the good and none-of-the-bad. Water is healthy, ours is pure, and we give money to children - it is a win, win, win baby! Polluting our land and water is simply not part of the equation. Every year, fifty billion plastic water bottles are consumed around the world, nearly thirty billion of them are from the United States. That means that Americans (4.5% of the World’s population) consume over half of the water that is bottled. According to the Columbia Water Center, here in the U.S we guzzle down 1,500 water bottles per second. Exacerbating this issue is that only 20% are recycled. This deposits 1,200 bottles every second in our landfills and waterways. If the unrecycled bottles every year were placed side by side they would cover the entire acreage of the United States 53 times over. (Schriever) These are containers of non-biodegradable plastics that will take anywhere from 450 to 1000 years to decompose and we’re running out of room. According to a biennial assessment done by Biocycle called “The State of Garbage in America”, "Massachusetts and Rhode Island have just 12 years of capacity remaining.” Dumping 533 billion acres of plastic bottles per year is simply ludicrous.
Born and raised in Alaska I have been gifted with a unique appreciation and connection with nature. My father, in one of those stereotypical embarrassing anecdotes, loves to recount when I was being potty trained. When I was learning how to use the outhouse (we don’t have an indoor toilet) a river otter came right up to the doorway and peered in at us. Then it darted away, off to the rest of its day. As I grew up these remarkable events continued to happen and teach me about the values of the surrounding food web. When we were little girls, my best friend, Elena Saldi, and I would often drive out to Dyea and watch the bears pick salmon out of the Taiya River. Her father, a commercial fisherman, spends every summer out in the ocean on his boat catching salmon. Any change to this sensitive web will harm his income and the many fishing communities in Alaska - not to mention throughout the world. The opportunity of chance encounters with river otters or going bear watching may not be afforded to our children as quantities of microplastics continue to pile inside of salmons’ bellies and thus transfer to the rest of the food web that depends on this vital resource. Can you imagine Southeast, Alaska without salmon?
Even before plastics make their way it into our oceans, the creation of these single use bottles harm our environment. Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley from the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California have estimated the energy required to produce bottled water is between 5.6 and 10.2 million joules of energy per liter. That is 2000 times the energy required to produce tap water. (phys.org) With our global population growth and increasing industry age energy demand is drastically increasing. Any small step of reducing our energy consumption will help with this demand.
Purchasing bottles taxes heavily on our environment as well as our pocketbooks. Bottle water companies gain profit from taking public water and then advertising its health benefits - and, at least in the case of Ethos, pointing out their donations to impoverished children are able to resell the water at 2,900 times the price of regular tap. In the process of convincing you to buy their water they are destroying the environment that they claim the water comes from. If we were to drink the recommended eight glasses of water a day from bottled water we would be spending around $1,400 a year. However, according to an article of the New York Times In Praise of Tap Water if you drank from the tap your cost per year would be ONLY forty-nine cents.
Not only is it costly to your pocket, but it is costly for countries. The United States’s West coast spends approximately 500 million dollars every year to clean up litter from their beaches. In one year the amount of disposable drinking bottles that were picked up off of beaches around the world equaled the equivalent weight of 19 Toyota Tacomas or 85,120 pounds of garbage. Imagine, the amount of bottles that were not picked up, but carried by ocean currents eventually eaten by sea life.
Now that we have determined that drinking out of the tap is good for the environment and your pocketbooks many people still can’t swallow the fact that tap water is in fact better for your health than bottled water. There are some cases where this is untrue, such as the case in Flint Michigan. In order to save 15 million dollars the governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, approved the switch of the town’s water supply from a glacial lake to the flint river. This new water supply was corrosive, however, and leeched the lead out of the old pipes and into the water stream. Snyder was advised to add a sealant into the water that would protect it from lead contamination, however because the cost was 9,000 dollars, Snyder refused. What is scary is that bottled water is actually less regulated than tap. In the United States the Environmental Protection Agency regulates public water and requires multiple daily tests for bacteria and demand that information to be public. However, bottled water is treated by a different standard. They are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration which requires only weekly testings and do not have to publicize their findings. (Green) This means that you have to put your complete faith in a large corporation’s word of whether or not their product is safe. In fact, in some instances bottled water has already proven to be contaminated, and affecting our health. the Natural Resources Defense Council conducted a study in which they tested 1,000 bottles of 103 bottled water brands for a range of pollutants, including arsenic, microbiological contaminants, and toxic chemicals. 1 in 4 tested contained bacterial or chemical contamination at levels that violated “enforceable state standards or warning levels,”. One sample contained DEHP. DEHP is a chemical used to produce plastics such as Polyethylene Terephthalate, otherwise known as PET. All of the disposable water bottles with a 1 marked on the bottom are made out of PET. These chemicals are potential cancer causing agents that can leach into your water bottle . PET has the ability to disrupt the human endocrine system. This system produces and regulates hormones that affect major bodily functions such as: reproduction, breathing, and even thinking. The Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for the safety of bottled water, has no standard, and in fact does not regulate PET.
Attempts are being made to address our plastic bottle epidemic, Skipping Rocks Labs, for example, has developed a new form of water packaging. This container, called Ooho!, looks like a small water balloon and is completely edible and biodegradable. The casing of the balloon is made out of brown algae and calcium chloride. It also only costs 2 cents to make. (discovery.com) This is one example of how you can minimize your plastic bottle use there are many viable options. In my family we each have a 32 oz refillable nalgene bottle. Since you can reuse the nalgene over and over again you are not placing harmful plastics in the environment and because it is not made of flimsy disposable plastic you won’t be placing harmful chemicals within your body.
How does buying a two dollar bottle of Ethos water really affect our planet? Isn’t it harmless? In the United States we are convinced that bottled water is necessary for survival, but in reality it is actually harming the quality of our environment and by using necessary oil and energy is adding to the escalating danger of climate change. In 2010 the United Nations recognized clean drinking water as an essential human right for all. However still to this day 783 millions people do not have access to clean drinking water. (unwater.org) Did you know that every liter of water that is bottled requires an actual 3 liters of water? (pacinist.org) In places such as Lebanon, Mexico, and the Marshall Islands their tap water is so polluted that it is impossible to drink. In America, the only excuse we have for buying bottled water is that we are lazy. By purchasing unnecessary bottled water we are effectively taking those resources from people and countries that need this water for survival.
Now that you know how drinking bottled water harms the environment, our pocketbooks, and our health it is time to take action. The towering peaks are getting closer and closer to their tipping point. In order to stop the flow of bottles into our landfills we must encourage the United States Government to dispose of disposables. Some cities have already taken the plunge and begun to limit these destructive containers from within their borders. San Francisco and Seattle no longer buy bottled water for city use and Chicago added a five-cent tax on each bottle. (Karlstrom and Dell'Amore) We must go past these examples and further reduce our consumption of these bottles by making a personal pledge against single use bottles and by encouraging our government to mandate the removal of all plastic bottles from public areas. In our consumerist society we are obligated to take every small action that we can to help save our
world’s resources, reduce climate change, and provide clean water for all. Removing plastic bottles from society is simply common sense. There is nothing “ethical” about buying bottled water.