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On Saturday, I finally got a chance to see Tapped – a compelling documentary about the business of bottled water in the United States. It was well worth my trek up to Mercer County Community College where Hackensack River Keeper was hosting the screening. Not available for purchase yet, the movie is only available to groups willing to pay $175 and charge admission. You can get a flavor for the movie by watching the 5 minute trailer.
I was most startled by the lack of regulation of bottled water. Most bottled water (60-70%) is sold in-state and is therefore completely unregulated by any agency. Bottled water that is transported across state lines is regulated by the FDA. Do you know how many people at the FDA are devoted to this task? Less than 1! When the interviewer asked the poor woman, she admitted that she actually had other responsibilities, too! WHAT?
Another astonishing fact was that a 10 cent bottle deposit has increased the recycling rate of disposable plastic bottles to 97% in Michigan. If plastic waste were the only problem posed by bottled water that would be a good solution.
Tapped showed the impact of the bottled water industry on rural towns across America where ground water is being mined. The arrogance of the multi-national corporations is disheartening. In the face of local opposition, dropping water levels in wells and water bodies, and even during droughts, they continue to pump water, bottle it, transport it, and sell it.
All those bottled water labels with pictures of pristine mountains portraying the product as pure and clean couldn’t be further from reality. This eye-opening film is worth tracking down to see. If you’re involved with any sort of environmental group, showing Tapped would be a great way to raise awareness and motivate supporters to drink tap water and a use a reusable bottle when on the go.
This morning I found a bottled water cost calculator on the New American Dream website. It enables you to calculate how much money you waste buying bottled water in a year. It’s very simple to use. First, you input the number of 16oz bottles of water you drink in a year, then the price of your tap water per gallon, and finally your average bottled water cost. If you don’t know your tap water cost, it’s safe to assume it’s around $0.002/gallon.
The results are startling! If you drink one bottle of water per day and pay $1.50 for it each time, you are spending an extra $550 on water! Even if you buy your bottled water very cheaply most of the time, you will still be wasting over $150 each year. The $10-15 investment in a high quality reusable bottle seems like a bargain by comparison!
On top of the cost savings you will achieve by using a refillable bottle, there are obvious environmental benefits as well. The calculator also estimates the impact of your bottled water habit on the planet. For the one-bottle-a-day person, an extra 114 gallons of water, 37 megajoules of energy, and 9 gallons of oil will be wasted as well as 68 pounds of CO2 generated.
If you’d like to reduce your impact and fatten your wallet, check out Back2Tap for your best value in high quality refillable water bottles.
Recycling is good but re-using is better. That’s the new trend for 2010.
Now more than ever students are starting to realize that they cannot just keep creating more and more garbage – the average student creates 67 pounds of garbage a year by bringing in a disposable lunch – that’s 18,760 pounds of garbage for an average sized elementary school every year!
Even with the best recycling efforts in place, the supply of recycled materials far exceeds the demand. Almost 80% of disposable plastic bottles end up in landfills. Not to mention the unnecessary waste associated with the production and distribution of disposable plastic bottles – it takes three bottles of water and a half a cup of oil to make and ship just one disposable plastic bottle of water. Also, there is a swirling mass of disposable plastic garbage twice the size of Texas floating in the North Pacific Ocean – further evidence that recycling isn’t working.
But there is a better way. Back2Tap now offers reusable sandwich wraps and snack pouches in addition to reusable stainless steel bottles so schools can encourage completely litter-less lunches. Back2Tap helped one school in NJ with its first “Waste-less Wednesday” and cut lunch room garbage in half!
Reusable sandwich wrap and bottle make a litter-less lunch.
Reusable bottles helped reduce waste at Washington Avenue School.
With over 69 million students in the United States, if just 10% of them made the switch to Reusable bottles and sandwich wraps, almost 1 billion disposable plastic bottles and 2 billion plastic baggies would be kept out of landfills every school year. Together we can all make a difference, one school at a time!
If you’d like more information about running a Back2Tap Litter-less Lunch campaign, contact customerservice@back2tap.com or call 866-228-3453.
Trying to sum up Back2Tap‘s company mission in a single word, we arrived at the following neologism: REUSOLUTION. It fits because we’re all about re-use, inciting a revolution against waste, offering solutions, and of course, resolving to do better. So, in honor of the New Year, we’d like to share our “reusolutions” for reducing disposable plastic in 2010:
Custom logoed stainless steel bottles
1. Reusable bottles for drinks on the go.
2. Reusable sandwich wraps and snack pouches for litter-less lunches.
3. Reusable grocery bags and produce bags to keep in the trunk of your car.
4. Reusable bags that are compact enough to fit into your purse or pocket for small purchases.
5. Reusable coffee mugs to take with you to the coffee shop or work.
Reusable sandwich wrap
6. Reusable cloths and rags for cleaning up the kitchen and the rest of the house.
7. Reusable cloth napkins with napkin rings for each member of your household.
8. Reusable containers for bringing food home from restaurants and to parties.
Reusable snack pouches
There is a vast array of reusable products that can help make disposable plastic a thing of the past in your home. Please share your REUSOLUTIONS with us by leaving a comment!
What do reusable bottles have to do with the flu? These days, everything seems to be peripherally related to flu, but aside from that, a Baxter Bulletin article yesterday reports that one principal is attributing low absenteeism rates with the use of reusable bottles.
Principal Randi Connior of Yellville-Summit Elementary in Arkansas noted that only 4% of her students were absent on Tuesday. Many districts are reporting absentee rates of 14-20% and higher. Every student at her elementary school has a reusable water bottle so students don’t have to use the water fountains in the hallways. “If you’ve ever watched kids drink from a school fountain,” she said, “you’ll usually see them sucking on it.” Students have been issued a reusable water bottle every year since principal Connior noticed a drop in absenteeism during a boil-water advisory when the water fountains were not being used.
When I searched “school water fountain hygiene” on-line, I found out that there are plenty of schools who have zeroed in on water fountains as a likely culprit for spreading contagious disease. In Charlestown, West Virginia, some Kanawha elementary principals have called school health officials about banning water fountain use as a way to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus according to a Charleston Gazette article.
In their guide to avoiding infections when returing to schools this fall, the National Jewish Health website explicitly warns: “Water fountains can be the enemy. Take a reusable water bottle to school, instead of using the school water fountain, which may become contaminated with germs, especially during cold and flu season.”
I’m heartened to find that the solution of choice is reusable bottles, a very eco-friendly response, rather bottled water with all its associated wastefulness. Custom reusable bottles are readily available for bulk purchase with a quick turnaround time from Back2Tap for any school or parent group who would like to take this step toward keeping children healthy as this perilous flu season gets underway.
When the Patriots Path Council called to invite Back2Tap to their Jamboree celebrating 100 years of Boy Scouts, I didn’t really know what to expect. Preparing for the “jambo,” I began to wonder whether any boys would visit a table presenting the evils of bottled water when they could be spear throwing, mountain boarding, bullwhip cracking, or watching an army tank run over a car.
In spite of having about 175 cool activities to choose from, a couple hundred of the 4300 scouts and leaders did find time to spend at the Back2Tap table this past Saturday. Every single boy and leader listened intently, asked questions, and seemed genuinely excited about our campaign for getting back to drinking tap water and using reusable bottles. This was definitely the best crowd I’ve ever worked with as an exhibitor. I also learned a lot – from the challenges of having private well water to the best type of carabiner.
Interestingly, even these outdoorsy community-minded folks who had reusable bottles clipped to their belts weren’t familiar with the astounding facts about bottled water waste. Many of them told us that if people knew about the:
• 140 million disposable bottles going to landfills everyday,
• 700 years it takes for plastic to decompose,
• 4 ounces of oil it takes to make each disposable bottle,
• 1000 times greater cost of bottled water, and
• more stringent regulatory oversight of tap water compared to bottled water,
they would be persuaded to drink tap water from reusable bottles instead of bottled water. Most people just don’t know about the hidden costs of their consumer choices. To illustrate these impacts, we had a sequencing activity where scouts put the 18 steps in the Life Cycle of a Disposable Plastic Water Bottle in order (see photo). Impacts on the environment were obvious at many steps in the Life Cycle. Before leaving, they were also able to take our Bottled Water IQ Test to see how much they had learned.
Obviously, there is a lot more work to do getting these facts and concepts out to people. Most of the scouts and scout leaders left our exhibit table eager to spread the Back2Tap message with the rest of their troop and with their communities. This is exactly the type of help the Back2Tap movement needs because it is not a message that large multi-national corporations with large advertising budgets is going to sponsor. It will take community leaders like scouts, teachers, PTO members, municipal volunteers, and green activists spreading the word, community by community. To find out how to help foster the Back2Tap movement, visit our community page.
Congratulations to the Patriots Path Council and the participating scout troops for organizing such an exciting and inspiring event. It was an honor to meet and talk with so many of you – thank you for sharing your opinions and suggestions with Back2Tap.
1 Billion. That is the number of disposable plastic bottles that could be kept out of landfills every year if just 10% of the students in the US, K-12, would switch to reusable bottles. This number is hard to believe and hard to visualize, but we’ve crunched the numbers and it’s true. The solution to this staggering amount of plastic waste is to reuse. By getting your children’s school to promote reusable bottles, you can help them “Join the Reusolution” and save that billion bottles.
Eliminating 10% of the disposable plastic bottles used by school children would also save 31 million gallons of oil, almost 400 million gallons of water, and 12 billion balloons worth (or 120 billion grams) of CO2 each year. The resources it takes to make these bottles is surprising, especially when you add them all up.
Collectively, parents would save over $25 million dollars in the first year by switching to tap water–based drinks from single serving drinks in disposable plastic bottles. This more than justifies the purchase of good quality reusable bottles.
To foster completely litter-less lunches, Back2Tap is offering reusable sandwich wraps and snack bags as well as custom-logoed stainless steel bottles for your school’s green fundraiser this year. Save money, save the planet – Join the Reusolution!
OK, I haven’t seen the movie “The Age of Stupid” yet, and from the looks of it, it won’t be easy to find it in a theatre nearby for quite a while, if ever. There are so many interesting eco-films out there that never come to a theatre near me. What’s up with that? In this day and age, it seems downright ridiculous and wrong to drive 45 minutes on a highway to see a movie, especially a green flick!
I’ve read three reviews of this movie so far this week: one says it’s overboard gloomy, one says it’s a wake up call, and one reports that it has already inspired a huge greenhouse gas reduction campaign in Great Britain called 10:10 (reduce emissions by 10% by 2010 – that would be in a few months!).
As a co-founder of Back2Tap, I figure I’ve got to see “The Age of Stupid” because it rails on people who think they are green simply because they recycle their disposable plastic bottles. The movie makes the point that it isn’t going to be as simple as recycling more or buying organic. We’re going to have to “reinvent” the way we live in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Thankfully, there is one lifestyle change we can all make without much effort – the way we drink water and use disposable plastic bottles. Tap water takes 800 times less energy to deliver than bottled water according to “The Age of Stupid.” We can all drink tap water from reusable bottles instead of bottled water and significantly reduce our waste of resources and carbon footprint. That is the primary message Back2Tap shares with schools, groups, and anyone who will listen. Join our Reusolution!
This is just wrong!
Many school fountains are in a state of disrepair.
During our 2007 Back2Tap reusable bottle campaign in our school district, we toured several of our schools to investigate the status of the school water fountains. It was shocking to find out that there is no access to tap water in some lunch rooms and numerous old water fountains in the hallways had been disabled. The perception seemed to be that they didn’t need to be fixed because students could rely on bottled water. Also, the school district makes money by selling bottled water in the cafeteria.
These images are from a Polaris Institute report on water fountains in Canadian universities: Campus Water Fountains: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but they could have been from just about any US school district.
We did a beverage survey and found out that 80% of the bottled water being consumed was coming from home. The school district didn’t stand to lose very much revenue if bottled water sales dropped, and parents stood to save money by not having to purchase bottled water. Two of our district schools were thrilled to use the funds raised by our stainless steel bottle fundraiser to purchase and install three school water coolers. Two other schools are likely to follow suit.
Back2Tap is working to replicate this model in other school districts by helping schools sell reusable stainless steel water bottles to raise money for point-of-use water coolers in school cafeterias and hallways. This is one good way to combat the trend toward limited access to drinking water in our communities.
When I first started my search for the best reusable bottle for our school fundraiser in the fall of 2007, I came across warnings about a variety of chemicals that could leach out of various types of bottles into drinks. Some claims seemed far fetched – especially the one about plastic bottles that are put in the freezer, but some claims seemed legitimate. Digging a little deeper, I found credible scientific sources who concluded that Bisphenol A (BPA) can leach out of plastic and is not a good chemical to ingest, even in small concentrations. BPA is a hormone disruptor that can affect the reproductive system and the nervous system, especially in children and infants. I quickly ruled out any plastic bottle that contained BPA – at the time, all Nalgene and Camelback bottles.
After eliminating the hard plastic (polycarbonate) bottles to avoid BPA, I considered the metal bottles: aluminum and stainless steel. Aluminum bottles have to be lined with something because aluminum is reactive. We steered away from Sigg because their bottles had openings too narrow for ice cubes and proper washing and drying. But we were also concerned about that liner. What was it made of? Would it wear and crack with use or abuse? Little did I imagine that Sigg’s aluminum bottles actually contained BPA and they were keeping that information from consumers while the BPA concern was growing! Ultimately, we chose stainless steel because it’s non-reactive and doesn’t need a liner. Stainless steel has also been around for decades and hasn’t been found to leach anything harmful into drinks.
Fast forward to 2009 – some reusable bottle companies have come up with a new type of hard plastic that doesn’t contain BPA and Sigg can now line their bottles with a liner that doesn’t have BPA, but you know what? I’m not sure I am willing to trust that this new plastic bottle and new liner are any better and that the companies would admit it if they weren’t better. Given Sigg’s years of misinformation about BPA, I’m just not sure anymore, so I’m sticking with stainless steel reusable bottles! Naturally, BPA-free!
EarthSense 