Skip to main content

MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Green Tip of the Week: Bottled Water


Note: This week's tip was written by Clayton Munnings, Campus Environmental Coordinator for SGA.

Another pervasive product with a severe environmental footprint, which can be eliminated by small lifestyle changes, is bottled water. In 2003, the average American consumed nearly 23 gallons of water.

For starters, plastic bottles are made from oil—an obvious problem. Oil is continually increasing in price and our peak oil production (many scientists believe) has already been reached, meaning scarcity will increase indefinitely. Why allocate an increasingly limited resource to the production of bottles? It is estimated that (if one includes all the energy into producing and transporting a bottle of water) that the amount of oil used to produce a single bottle would fill it 1/3 of the way.

The cost is reason enough to give up bottled water.  The average price of a bottle of water is a buck. When one fills up a glass at the faucet, the cost of that water is a fraction of a penny. And quality is not a factor for Monroe County—we have some of the best water in the world.  The quality of bottled water is equal to, perhaps less than, that of our tap water.

Lastly, proper disposal is rare. 40 million plastic water bottles go into the trash every day. Overall, only 12 percent of the plastic water bottles get recycled. The bottles are adding to landfills at an increasing rate. Recycling plastic bottles cuts down on the emissions that are inherent in burning fossil fuels to create new ones.

There are obvious solutions to this problem: purchase a Nalgene bottle or re-fill plastic water bottles more than once. Find a drinking fountain. And please, if you want to recycle your plastic bottle (or aluminum can) do NOT throw it into the knee-high blue recycling bins in your classroom. This will cause cross-contamination, because these recycling bins are meant for paper recycling only—the entire bin will be thrown in the garbage, paper included. Look for the chest high blue recycling bins that are for plastic bottles only.  This is the proper way to recycle your bottles.

Matthew Fox
Sustainability Committee
03/13/2008