COLUMN: Water bottles are my worst nightmare
News Editor | Kate Carlson
I know that being environmentally friendly is not always the most convenient thing to do, but we live in a wasteful society with a short attention span. Most people think “going green” means returning their empty pop cans every month. I am tired of being one of the few who cares about living a sustainable life.
Eco-anxiety — the chronic concern for the environment, or as I like to refer to it, being constantly aware of the eminent peril of the well-being of our planet, is one of the many stressors always in the back of my mind.
Can I recycle this? Should I eat only local food so less gas is used to ship it to the store? Should I stop driving my car and only use my bike from now on? Should I stop eating meat because farming techniques for livestock are not sustainable?
While I’m debating adopting a locally-grown vegan diet and ditching my car for my bike and public transportation, it’s really hard for me to swallow the fact that a lot of my peers regularly buy water sold in a “disposable” plastic bottle. Some people not only pay money for this natural resource that is readily available for free or a fraction of the cost to us as privileged U.S. citizens, but throw away the bottle after just one use.
Recycling helps, but is the lesser of two evils. Recycling the bottle means it probably will be shipped overseas, using energy and fossil fuels where it would take more energy and nonrenewable resources to be recycled.
Some people don’t even recycle their plastic vessel, but have the audacity to throw it in the trash without a second thought. This route inevitably means the water bottle will end up in a landfill where it takes the plastic 70 to 450 years to decompose, or it will arrive god knows where — maybe congealed along with all of the other plastic products in the giant mass twice the size of Texas that is floating around in the ocean.
That is terrifying, because when plastics break down, they don't biodegrade, they photodegrade. This means the materials break down into smaller fragments. These readily absorb toxins which contaminate soil, waterways and animals upon digestion.
How anyone can willingly pay money to participate in a practice with so many negative outcomes blows my mind, yet 50 percent of the plastic Americans use is used just once and thrown away. Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times, and only five percent of the plastics we produce are recovered through recycling efforts.
All wasteful behavior makes me angry, but buying bottled water is a mainstream practice that needs to become a thing of the past. Tap water is more stringently monitored than bottled water and is available for a fraction of the cost. People are going to look back at our generation and wonder why we as a society accepted this activity as normal for so long.
CMU has drinking fountains located in every academic building, most of them even are designed to easily refill water bottles. The university still sells water bottles on campus, but that doesn’t mean we have to buy them. If we stop buying them, they will stop being sold.
For the sake of my eco-anxiety — but more importantly, our planet — stop wasting your money and causing harm to the environment by purchasing bottled water.
