Student Action

US: Chipping down the mountain of plastic water bottles

The Journal Times Online. By David Steinkraus -

They are ubiquitous, a habit which people get into and which Sister Jane Weiss took a second look at.

“I’d been looking for something to lessen this mountain of plastic,” said Weiss, who is assistant principal at St. Catherine’s High School in Racine. So these days, since October, bottled water is ubiquitous everywhere except in the halls of St. Catherine’s.

Across the nation, only 10 percent of plastic water bottles are recycled, says a report from the New York state Department of Conservation. In 2005 the unrecycled bottles equalled about 2 million tons of plastic made from about 18 million barrels of crude oil. A California state government report notes that the plastic from the millions of bottles discarded in state landfills could be used to produce 74 million square feet of carpet or 16 million sweaters.

And according to the Beverage Marketing Corp., bottled water firms projected sales of 9 billion gallons for 2007, an increase of 10 percent over the preceding year, with a value of $12 billion. The New York report notes that bottled water can cost as much as $10 per gallon.

Sara Staples, 17, a junior at St. Catherine’s High School, gets a cup of water at lunch Tuesday in the school cafeteria. The school has two water tanks — one refrigerated, one not — to encourage students to forgo bottled water. Photo by Mark Hertzberg, Journal Times

Easy if not cheap

It was common for the St. Catherine’s staff to buy cases of bottled water from local discount stores to supply the school, said Beverly Gilbert, the school’s food service manager. “It’s easy. It’s easier than filling up a container,” she said.

Now a tall cylinder sits on a counter at the cafeteria entrance. A thin copper pipe connects it to the city water supply. Students take a plastic foam cup from a tray and select either the blue spigot (chilled water) or the white spigot (room temperature water). The water dispenser cost about $300, Gilbert said, and its filters, good for six months, are $100 each.

As another step to eliminate those single-serving water bottles, Weiss said, all staff members were given their own refillable water bottles.

“I come in here at 6, and they’re in here shortly after filling up their water bottles,” Gilbert said.

There is still a large vending machine in the cafeteria selling bottled water, but it’s for use after the regular school day, after the cafeteria has closed. There are also some pains associated with the transition away from bottled water, most of

them financial.

“Bottled water was a very good seller for us — very good,” Gilbert said. Now she has to find other ways to make up the revenue loss. Then there’s the issue of those plastic cups. Her goal is to replace them by the end of the semester with paper cups, but she’s found that good paper cups are very, very expensive.

Racine Unified School District has no plans to eliminate bottled water, according to said Dan Blimling, resident district manager for Chartwells which provides food service to the

district.

Increases in the price of oil have recently driven up the price of plastic cups, he said, “but it’s still a lot more economical to buy a Styrofoam cup than a paper cup.” Paper cups also pose their own challenges, he said. The good ones are made with layers of plastic, “and they don’t biodegrade near as much as we think they do,” he said. “Maybe they can get the paper back out of it, but at what cost?”

“Ideally, I wish everybody would carry their own bottle,” Gilbert said.

Choices

On its Web site, the International Bottled Water Association declares campaigns against bottled water to be campaigns against consumer choice and the improved health that may result from regularly drinking clean water. The IBWA also says that it supports recycling and that a narrow focus on bottled water misses the larger issue of how much packaging material is used in industry.

“I like tap water better,” said St. Catherine’s student Sam Peterson, 17. She drinks it at home and prefers the taste to bottled water. “It’s more convenient to have here.”

“I like bottled water,” said 18-year-old student Justin Brantley. It’s not the taste, and he hasn’t thought about buying a refillable bottle. To him the key is convenience.