We live in a world where we are at odds with our environment. For most people, day-to-day life is a race to see how much of this planet’s resources we can consume and how much we can contaminate the natural world. This accusation should take you aback. You probably don’t consciously perform these actions and would admonish a person for partaking in them blatantly. Our problem is that environmental degradation is built into the way our society functions and the cyclical systems in which we all operate. It is the desire to break these fundamental assumptions and status quo modes of operation that lead me to support banning water bottle use on the campus of the University of Michigan.

The idea for the ban originated last year with Maggie Oliver, an LSA senior and chair of the Michigan Student Assembly’s Environmental Issues Commission (EIC). Hoping to improve UM’s environmental impact by instituting a ban on the sale of plastic water bottles by the University, Oliver and the EIC circulated a petition in support of these goals during the Winter term of last year. The petition drive was highly successful, garnering thousands of signatures, and Oliver hopes to take her ban request to the Board of Regents to actually institute change in University policy.

So why should the regents support the ban? Most important, there is an overwhelming environmental case against the sale of plastic water bottles. The plastic used to make these bottles is manufactured from corn, petroleum, and other chemicals. Not only does the extraction of petroleum pose environmental risks (see the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico last summer), but water bottles themselves also generate an enormous quantity of waste. In 2006, for instance, according to the Government Accountability Office, the United States produced roughly one million tons of plastic PET water bottles, three quarters of which ended up in landfills, and will take thousands of years to decompose.

There are also individual health risks entailed by the use of plastic bottles. Though most plastic in its finished form is not toxic, certain types—including phthalates, a variety found in many plastic bottles—can leach into food. The Environmental Protection Agency and independent researchers have suggested that these plastics may disrupt the endocrine system or act as carcinogens.

Given these arguments, though, you might wonder why we should specifically ban water bottles. Plenty of other soft drinks and beverages are packaged in plastic bottles; shouldn’t we ban them, too? In an ideal world, such a broad ban would be a perfect outcome, but given the constraints of the real world, there are a couple reasons why banning water bottles specifically is a good idea. One is that nearly half of all “purified” bottled water begins as municipal water. In other words, by buying this water we are paying for water that is readily available at our taps and drinking fountains. Additionally, according to the National Resources Defense Council, over 90% of the cost of a water bottle is not water related, like packaging, shipping, and marketing. It is cheaper and simpler for both water providers and consumers to deliver water at the tap, at fountains, or at refill stations. This argument, of course, does not apply to Gatorade or Red Bull, but it is a reasonable and workable solution for the delivery of water. Hopefully in the future we will develop a means of providing individuals with dispersed access to beverages in containers whose production has no negative impact; for now, banning plastic water bottles in order to reduce the environmental, health and economic costs of plastic bottle production and consumption is the best place to start tackling this issue.

Finally, critics of the ban may object that, by eliminating bottled water for purchase at UM, we would be infringing on consumer choice and rights of the University community. Shouldn’t everyone have the freedom to choose whatever beverage he or she desires? This concern is misguided for two reasons. Governmental and institutional regulations already ban the sale of certain products—we are now a smoke free campus after all—and the water bottle ban simply builds on this logic of restriction in the interest of protecting the health and well-being of consumers.

Of course UM students would still have access to the very same water they currently find in purchased bottles. By combing the ban with a massive education campaign that encourages students to use personal, reusable water bottles, and by installing more refill stations in buildings around campus, we can make it clear that good, clean water is more easily and cheaply available to them than ever.

As long as bottled water continues to be available and sustainability education is slow, people will continue to use them. Our University is a sustainability leader in many ways, but it lags behind many of its peer institutions in operational standards for environmental friendliness. If the regents boldly accept MSA’s petition, they would back the University’s claim of being a leader in sustainability and help the student body and the entire UM community lead the way to a greener, more sustainable future.

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