San Francisco bans bottled water for city staff
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Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco has given city workers an executive order to ban bottled water due to their wasteful nature. San Francisco will no longer spend city funds on bottled water in favor of tap water, which the city claims is better than bottled water. The city estimates it will save $500,000 a year from this act alone. According to San Francisco, the price of one gallon of bottled water is enough to purchase 1000 gallons of tap water! In fact the amount of resources it takes to create the plastic for bottled water is astonishing.
Get all the facts about how bottled water is wasteful here.
Besides saving money, Gavin Newsom says this executive order also addresses environmental concerns in the amount of oil used to make bottled water and the transportation of the products.
This order comes at a time when San Francisco was the first city in the Nation to outright ban plastic bags from grocery stores to help curb global warming and to reduce city littering. Read more about that in my previous post back in March here.
In my opinion, while these measures seem a bit extreme...they are also forcing people to realize that we live in a society that is very wasteful. These measures force people to conserve resources and use what's available to them.
5 COMMENTS, ADD YOURS HERE:
I'm happy that they no longer buy bottled water! It's stupid to do so. Use a glass, or a mug... get it from the tap. You can drink water without producing waste, so why even think of using a disposable container? As far as the bags go, I'm not sure I agree with banning plastic bags. They cost much less energy to produce, and take up much less space in landfills than the same amount of paper bags. What should we all do? Bring your own reusable bags!!!
thats exactly what they want you to do...or they want you to use the same plastic bags over and over again...just bring them with you before you go the grocery store or buy an organic cloth grocery bag to re-use...I know its a difficult situation but once you get use to re-using it won't seem that bad at all.
Some of the money saved can be reinvested into ensuring the water supply is safe.
I am living now in Romania where the tap water is a little more concerning. We order water now for a water cooler but... we could consider testing our tap water and maybe installing a secondary filter if needed. Seems useless to duplicate a water delivery system if it is functioning well.
Now that's a group-hug feel good goody measure isn't it.
Here's my personal list of things that should be next:
- SUVs
- People who set their AC below 80
- People who pile on the food at the buffet but don't eat it all.
- Not re-using paper tissue.
- Using more than 3 sheets for #2
- baby fomula
- lawn watering
- personal swimming pools
there are 128 fl. ounces in one gallon. this means we spend about 6.4 dollars a gallon for bottled water, and we Americans contiuously bitch about the price of gasoline.
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