Looks like the Seahawks v. 49ers feud has spilled over a bit.
Looks like Seattle is doing what it can to one-up San Francisco on bottled water bans. http://forcechange.com/104537/ban-plastic-water-bottles-in-major-city/
We applaud the environmentally-conscious and 100% agree that plastic bottle waste is extensive, totaling upwards of 13% of our annual landfill waste. What we tend to question is not the merit of the concept of reducing bottled water waste, but “tap-is-never-bad” beliefs of our friends at organizations like banthebottle.net.
Fundamentally, what they’re arguing for is good: use less plastic bottles. Great. We’d argue that there are more things put in plastic bottles than just water, but evidently this is lost on some groups.
We can handle the environmental arguments, what we can’t handle is their misinformation over municipal water.
It is a chlorinated beverage served miles from the point where it was last tested and then run through water mains that are often times decades, if not a century, old. Great, you’ve pointed out that there is little to no regulation on bottled water for pathogen protection. Yet, we get a dozen boil alerts a day posted via our Google Alerts. Those are broken mains. These groups aren’t arguing for having ultraviolet light sanitation stations put on every municipal tap.
There are currently no regulations over tracking the quantities of pharmaceuticals in the water. These groups aren’t arguing to having these added to the Safe Water Drinking Act standards.
We agree bottled water is wasteful. That doesn’t alter the facts about municipal water.
