It's been more than a year since bottled water and corporate America collided at Grand Canyon National Park, and the push continues to get more national parks to phase out packaged water in favor of fresh tap water and refillable bottles.
Next week National Park Service officials at Yosemite and Mount Rainier national parks, Independence Hall National Historical Park, and Golden Gate National Recreation Area will be presented with over-sized postcards urging them to phase out disposable water bottles.
At Corporate Accountability International, a non-profit that works to encourage cleaner environmental habits, officials intend to make March 27 a "national day of action ... in a heated battle between those who are fighting to get billions of plastic bottles out of our waste stream, and Coca-Cola (owner of Dasani), who is throwing hurdles in the way of those parks that want to become bottled water free."
Coca-Cola rose to the limelight back in November 2011 when an email trail seemed to indicate the beverage maker was pressuring the National Park Foundation to urge the Park Service not to ban disposable water bottles at Grand Canyon National Park. At the time, Park Service officials said they weren't bowing to corporate pressure but simply conducting due diligence on the impacts of such a ban. For instance, they said at the time, how might the safety of visitors to Southwestern parks such as the Grand Canyon, Arches, and Canyonlands be impacted by a ban?
Ultimately, Grand Canyon officials, who had installed water filling stations early in 2011, were able to phase-out bottled water and put to use filling stations they had installed
Kristin Urquiza, who oversees the "Outside the Bottle and Public Works Compaign" for Corporate Accountability International, says more parks need to follow Zion, Hawaii Volcanoes, and Grand Canyon national parks in phasing out the sale of disposable water bottles.
At the same time, she was critical of an extensive memorandum (attached below) Park Service Director Jon Jarvis sent out to his superintendents in the wake of the Grand Canyon uproar that directed the steps they would need to take to phase-out bottled water. That memo called for superintendents to, among other things, review the amount of waste that could be eliminated from their park; consider the costs of installing and maintaining water filling stations for visitors; review the resulting impact on concessionaire and cooperative association revenues, and; consult with the Park Service's Public Health Office.
Then, too, they must consider "contractual implications" to concessionaires, the cost and availability of BPA-free reusable containers, and signage so visitors can find water filling stations. Also, they need to take into consideration safety considerations for visitors who might resort to drinking water "from surface water sources with potential exposure to disease" or who neglect to carry enough water with them on hikes.
"That is a clear indication of how Coke, stepping in, really is putting pressure on the Park Service to make it much more difficult for additional parks to follow suit," maintained Ms. Urquiza during a phone conservation. "Coke and the other bottlers, Nestle and Pepsi, there were several conference calls that were organized with Park Service employees and representatives from the big bottlers, asking them to put a hiatus on additional bans, and really working to stop this from happening in additional places."
To get more parks to phase-out bottled water, the non-profit has been working with stakeholders in and out of national parks, including concessionaires, "to help give Park Service (superintendents) the support they need to really move forward on implementing a 'bottled-water-free' policy in their parks," she said.
While none of the four parks has given "firm commitments" to moving forward with a ban, said Ms. Urquiza, talks have been ongoing to examine the feasibility of such a ban.
"The real exciting feedback that we've been getting is that water in the parks is an incredibly important issue for superintendents," she said. "They want to figure out how to minimize the amount of waste, to promote public water."
The organization plans to organize efforts this fall in Washington, D.C., to lobby the Park Service to hold firm to its original plan of having refillable water stations in 75 percent of park visitor centers by 2016, while encouraging parks to discontinue the sale of disposable bottled water.
On March 27, next Wednesday, the non-profit hopes superintendents at Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Independence Hall, and Golden Gate will commit to moving forward with a ban of disposable water bottles. "Our hope is that the superintendents can make a public commitment to implementing bottled-water-free policies," Ms. Urquiza said. "We're really hopeful, and see this as a win-win for parks.
"... At the end of the day, it's really sending the wrong message for our national parks to be promoting bottled water," she added.
At least one reusable bottlemaker, Vapur, has been talking with national parks about installing water-filling stations for visitors. Company officials, however, have declined to discuss what progress they're making.
Comments
I don't enjoy being restricted, either. But sometimes restrictions are very necessary for my own survival. When I was a high school kid a thousand years ago learning to fly, my instructor kept giving lectures on aerodynamics and other little details. Things like air speed and angle of attack. Every time he finished one of his homilies, he'd knock a knuckle against a picture over his desk to emphasize the point. The picture showed an airplane's tail sticking up from a smoking crater, and below were the words "The Law Of Gravity Is STRICTLY Enforced."
At what point do we decide when any environmental consequence of our actions becomes trivial? With over 7 Billion of us living here now, even a trivial consequence may not be so trivial after all. They do add up, don't they?
Part of the problem is that no one really understands all the subtle complexities or our planet and how they interact. Is it possible that some dark day we (or our descendants) may all wake up to the realization that we just passed the point of no return and it's suddenly become time to kiss ourselves goodby? I have a strong hunch that the Law of Gravity is not the only natural law that is strictly enforced. Trouble is, the consequences of violating that law are usually pretty quick and dramatic. The others are not so obvious. Heck, we don't even know what some of the other laws are!
Perhaps real wisdom demands that we stop allowing ourselves to be led around by the advertising agencies and learn to apply some good critical thinking to all our decisions -- even if they may seem at the moment to be trivial or passe' or may decrease someone's profit margin. I'm not convinced that it's only the bureaucrats who have lost their common sense. It seems like many of our companions in the public sector also abandoned that quality a long time ago.
Lee, I respectively ask you to show how water bottles are a meaningful threat to our "finite" resources or our planet - which is hardly fragile.
A previous article in the Traveler includes some data from 2011 about the environmental impacts of disposable plastic bottles - including the amount of oil required to make them. The number of those items that end up in landfills every year is so large it's probably impossible to comprehend.
Water in disposable plastic bottles serves a useful purpose in parts of the world where safe drinking water isn't readily available. For the most part in this country, it's a convenience and a perceived need created by triumph of successful marketing. One site says $15 billion was spent in the U.S. in 2012 on bottled water, while the amount consumed vs. used for other purposes is essentially free from the tap. If you don't like the taste of your water at home, a basic filter on your kitchen faucet runs the cost all the way up to about 5 cents a liter.
As the joke about one brand goes, "Evian spelled backwards is naive." News that Dasani bottled water sold in the U.K. was nothing more than London tap water caused a little PR problem for Coca Cola back in 2004....but most consumers have short memories.
Would banning their sale in parks reduce demand and encourage some visitors to switch to a refillable water bottle on a long-term basis? Hard to say.
A more effective solution to the problems posed by throw-away beverage containers of all kinds would be a cash deposit high enough to encourage many people to return them to claim the deposit. Most of those which were still tossed out by the ultra-lazy would be likely picked up by others to collect the deposit. Way back when, that system worked pretty well for "pop bottles." A deposit system would be most efficient only if it were uniformly in place in all states—and that's a very unlikely prospect.
And may I respectfully ask you to prove beyond doubt that you are right and I'm not? You first, ec.
Part of the answer to Lee and EC's debate is found in the link in Jim Burnett's post just above:
About 22 billion plastic bottles ended up in landfills and incinerators in 2010 (probably even more this year.) One source says making plastic bottles to meet the US demand for bottled water requires more than 15 million barrels of oil annually; another source says 7% of total US oil consumption is used for making new plastic (including water bottles.)
Unfortunately, such numbers don't have much meaning to those who feel the resources of our planet are not finite, and waste of that magnitude is simply something to be shrugged off. Almost of us in this country, myself included, are too often lazy and complacent when it comes to trying to be more responsible users of all of the resources available to us, finite or not.
Which is two tenths of one percent of our total consumption of oil. It is one tenth to 3 tenths of a percent of the estimated reserves in ANWR. I would hardly call that a "threat" to a finite resource.
There is very little in this thread that deserves even a moticum of attention or respect.
EC -
The attitude that "there's plenty more where that came from" so there's no reason to give any thought to using resources wisely is one reason so many people in other parts of the world view the U.S. as a nation of arrogant and greedy people. I'm afraid those views are well-deserved.