Don’t ban the bottle

Bottled water is here to stay. Think about it: whereas there is a nearly free water source in your kitchen or workplace thanks to indoor plumbing, the appeal and convenience of bottled water has proven to supersede common sense—oil extraction, chemical resources, recycling and shipping are all necessary to produce the product. And that’s only the container!

I’m glad that students here at PSU have suggested a grassroots effort to eliminate the consumption of illogical plastic, especially since the enterprise has grown so large in such a short amount of time. A legislative ban on plastics is highly unlikely. There is too much profit and the promise of high profit margins at stake for those with the means of controlling the market.

Student groups can ban together and make things happen. Change.org has petitions for eliminating bottled water in Congress. Concord, Mass., enacted a prohibition on single-use containers last year and editorials here at the Vanguard are buzzing along the anti-stupid-plastic crusade.

However, as a technology-, plastic has proven to be invaluable to convention-al food and goods preservati-on. Much of your “organic” food has been shipped in plastic. It protects supplies from rat-infestation and harmful bacteria, among others. But as people have began to realize, the side-effec-ts of plastics on, not only our health, but by proxy that of many ecosystems-, may be more malignant that officially construed.

That being said, a corporate response will only be initiated once they are presented with a win-win situation. Safe, biological alternativ-es to plastics require massive R&D, which will only be considered a financial investment once revenues from current products begin to drop.

Popular snack items that have begun this process have already had issues. The Sun Chips bag comes to mind, after an 11 percent drop in sales due to their bag being so obnoxiously noisy. The chip bag would decompose after fourteen weeks in the dirt, but the appeal of being green junk food was not enough to override simple market forces.

But for anti-plastic crusaders, there is a new hope in Pepsi’s latest technology. Made 100 percent

of raw materials, they also seek to employ their agricultural waste by-products in the endeavor, while others in the beverage industry scramble to make something of the same effect.

Whether eliminating one-time-use plastic water bottles primarily requires communal bans or personal consumer choices is irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, it ultimately necessitates business decisions from the higher-ups.

Due to this, any attempt at simply banning bottled water is largely futile—that’s not to say it can’t be done (which would perhaps be the ideal), but that it is an unreasonable expectation in the near future. The vast majority of us are apathetic on the subject, and the idea of bottled water has become commonplace throughout the first world. It is also useful in emergencies and easier to ship than glass.

In the public mind, there is simply more important matters than the allegedly developing Pacific garbage heap, an Atlantic one coming in to creation and adverse health effects from plastics, compared to the democratic revolutions in North Africa and the catastrophe in Japan and next week’s paycheck.

Certainly, we cannot ignore the issue of plastic waste. People should continue on their soap-boxes (with loudspeakers even) to combat unnecessary garbage that comes in the form of single-use bottles. Although, it may be more efficient to start writing letters to our corporations rather than our Congressmen if we want any real change to happen anytime soon. ?