The Bottled Water Debate

I’ve recently been privy to a series of emails from various college dining services purchasers and the like, all debating the relative merits of banning bottled water from campus, as they call it. To be more accurate, they should say, to stop selling bottled water in campus retail locations. There’s no way they can “ban” bottled water from being brought onto campus from outside sources.

To me, this should be a no brainer. Bottled water is one of the most wasteful inventions in history. Americans throw away sixty million water bottles PER DAY in the U.S. Sixty MILLION. Take a moment to picture that. And arguments that recycling can eliminate this problem are a load of BS. Barely a quarter of the bottles produced in this country are recycled. The obvious and very simple alternative to this extraordinary quantity of waste is to stop selling bottled water. However, the industry, including a number of college retailers, argue that they wouldn’t stock bottled water if people weren’t buying it. However, this is another ridiculous argument, and one that you hear to justify everything from fast food to underpriced sweatshop clothing- “well, people are buying it.” People would probably buy crack if you started selling it in retail locations, but you don’t see anyone doing that, now do you?


To an extent, there is some validity to this argument. People ARE buying all the shit out there on the market, and the people selling it are making money off it- so they keep selling it. McDonald’s would not continue to exist if it weren’t raking in billions of dollars every year. But who’s to blame, really? You can blame consumers for being uninformed and not thinking about their decisions. You can blame the industries for aggressive marketing, especially to children. Hell, you can blame every aspect of this society for making people into consumers, and leaving them with no choice except to be slavishly dependent on what they can purchase- and for being driven to look for the lowest price out of necessity. If we still knew how to grow our own food, and still had access to clean water, things like fast food and bottled water wouldn’t even be issues.

But we are currently trapped within the confines of a consumer culture (for the time being), and that leaves the question: do we stop selling bottled water, or continue in this vein? Stopping selling water would clearly eliminate an enormous amount of waste. But if colleges stopped selling bottled water, they would be required to install more water fountains, so that students continue to have access to water- and that, and this is the key, costs money and does not make any profit for the college.

The various people at other colleges who have weighed in on this like to laundry list excuses like, “tap water isn’t as high quality as bottled,” which is patently not true in most cases (tap water is more strictly regulated than bottled, the problem comes with poor plumbing at the college itself, which is fixable), and rambling about how they only want to offer the highest quality products to their students. I honestly would not be so irritated if they would just come right out and say they don’t want to lose money.

No, if they really cared about students they would be more interested in providing the cleanest water possible- in a form far more accessible than expensive bottled water, ie public fountains at more regular intervals. And if they cared about the environment, it wouldn’t even be a question. But, like people everywhere, they refuse to acknowledge their real motivations- instead attacking the environmentalists for not also attacking bottled soda (uh?).

It comes down to the same thing that is ALWAYS an issue, and is at the heart of every environmental argument: if we all had access to clean water, would bottled water be in any way successful? Is it within our rights as human beings to continue to access one of the basic necessities of life without paying an arm and a leg for it? It hearkens back to the public bathroom issue. The trend right now is to make you pay for everything, basic necessity or not. The perfect consumer is one that doesn’t have any other options.