New York City will save two million dollars if an upcoming bill succeeds in banning the municipal government from buying bottled water for its office buildings, say the bill's proponents, City Councilmen Eric Gioia and Simcha Felder. Eliminating the bottles from the city's waste stream of 12,000 tons daily will yield savings both in dollars and in the volume that ends up in a landfill. While plastic bottles are recyclable, 60 million water bottles end up in landfills or incinerators every single day out of the more than 70 million that are on average consumed nationwide.
New York has been stepping up its recycling efforts, and has seen strong results from a pilot program of recycling bins in public parks, but as with residential curbside recycling, the contamination rate for plastic, glass and metals is consistently higher than that for paper
(download report here).
If the ban, which will be introduced at the next city council meeting, is approved, offices can install water coolers that connect directly to a pipe and filter tap water internally. In a city with one of the cleanest drinking water supplies in the world, and which is one of just a handful of large cities with the EPA's approval to leave its tap water unfiltered, the increase in bottled water sales is not the result of necessary health precautions. It is, at least in part, the result of aggressive marketing schemes by bottled water companies that in other cities have led to legislative disputes. In October, Nestle threatened to sue Florida's Miami-Dade county if it did not pull a radio ad promoting tap water as cheaper and safer than bottled water, and environmental groups in Canada have filed a complaint that Nestle made false claims in advertising, including the statement in a full-page newspaper ad that "Nestle Pure Life is a Healthy, Eco-Friendly Choice."
Meanwhile, a new company bottling New York City tap water calls itself environmentally superior to bottles shipped from, say, Fiji. In terms of sustainability, the fewer food miles, the better; but the only environmentally sensible solution to bottled water is to not drink it. Bottled water has been found to contain toxins leeched from the bottles themselves, and the production of plastic is a major source of the world's toxins that have left one in five people worldwide without access to safe drinking water.
Plastic is difficult to dispose of -- it takes hundreds of years to decompose in a landfill, if it ever does, which as with other materials is unlikely due to the lack of oxygen in such compressed spaces. If the recycling rate were to increase, the melting of recycled plastic consumes energy and releases toxins. It also must be blended with virgin plastic in order to create a viable material, which is ultimately used for products such as plastic lumber, while bottles for water (and other food and beverage items) are made from new, unused plastic.