Concerned that their commitment to adequate hydration is having a negative impact on global climate, University of California San Diego students have voted to “ban the bottle,” completely eliminating single-use plastic water bottles on campus.
They are incredibly proud of themselves for this giant environmental leap forward: “One manner in which we can achieve these goals [of being waste free] is to phase out the sale of plastic water bottles,” Associate Vice President of Environmental Justice Affairs Moon Pankam told the UCSD student newspaper. “[B]y participating in a culture of reusable water bottle and hydration station usage…UCSD students, staff, and faculty can reduce negative environmental impacts in a manner that is also cost effective.”
Pankam, along with UCSD’s “Project Director for the Water Bottle Ban” (a real thing), will oversee the gradual elimination of the pervasive recyclable menaces from campus life, a move which they say sends a message to everyone involved in the vast plastic water bottle conspiracy to destroy the planet.
UCSD will not be the first school to attempt a single-use water bottle ban. The University of Vermont made a similar effort last year, to disastrous results. It turns out, students buy bottled water because it’s easy to come by, fast to grab, and cheap. When bottled water isn’t an option in vending machines, they just grab other bottled drinks, which meant the “water bottle ban” was actually followed by an increase in the number of plastic bottles on campus of 6%.
As for UC San Diego, they say that instead of offering only drinking fountains as an alternative as UVermont did, they’ll make sure the campus stores stock “boxed water,” an “environmentally friendly” alternative to bottled water. But according to the Bottled Water council (also a real thing), only 0.92% of all plastic used in the US is contained in water bottles, and most of it is recyclable. The real danger to the environment comes in the shipping and production phases — phases that aren’t eliminated when you switch to boxed water.
And we’ve been to a few summer music festivals where they serve only boxed water, and it creates a huge heap of trash because people don’t realize, like they do with cans and bottles, that boxed water is recyclable. So while boxed water might make you feel better it’s not actually better.
If anything, appropriate to today’s infantilized campus culture, the main effect of boxed water may be that it makes you feel like you’re sucking down a juice box just before your preschool naptime.
But far be it from us to rain (bottled water) on USCD’s environmental parade.