Here is an editorial from today's Tulsa World. She quotes me accurately and portays me the right amount of zealot as well.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/opinion/article.aspx?articleID=070630_7_G1_spanc24764Battling the bottle: City's efforts to go green should include targeting water bottles By JULIE DELCOUR Associate Editor
7/1/2007
The carpeting at the Metropolitan Environmental Trust is made out of recycled water bottles. Ask MET Executive Director Michael Patton how friendly plastic water bottles are to the environment and he might start pacing around on that carpet, spouting facts and figures, seeing red while thinking green. Use of plastic water bottles (PWBs)is one of the world's most wasteful habits.
Nationally, nine out of 10 PWBs end up in the trash. Americans spend almost $11,000 a minute quenching their thirst on from bottled water. Sales worldwide are $35 billion. Five years ago six billion bottles were sold in the U.S. That figure has risen six percent every year since.
Patton applauds San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's ban last week on the purchase of PWBs with city funds. Each month, the MET collects six tons of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles curbside and nine tons from collection bins. That's about one and a half pounds per household from the 20,000 households that recycle. About 30 percent of PET collections are water bottles -- 160,000 bottles per month. (Most others are soda bottles.) "Our 30 percent number means that the average family would generate about 225 plastic water bottles per year," Patton said, "and only about 16 of those bottles get recycled."
Most plastic water bottles aren't reincarnated as carpeting, fake lumber or flower pots. They go to die in landfills, where they will live almost forever. It takes a 1,000 years for one to biodegrade. Even the best recycling efforts are failing to keep pace with all that waste, and the environmental consequences are enormous. In San Francisco, city leaders decided they needed to do something. Newsom's ban is but the latest step to encourage environmental action among citizens. A lot of cities, including Tulsa, could follow the example.
While Mayor Kathy Taylor has not issued any orders on plastic water bottles, she is a fan of recycling. The city has a long list of green goals departments are urged to follow: Decrease energy consumption by turning off lights in empty rooms, shutting down computers after work and carpooling or riding the bus. Those who drive city vehicles must observe a no-idling policy. City departments are being asked to decrease fuel consumption by 10 percent. The city uses energy-efficient light bulbs and some biodiesel fuels. Tulsa also is a member of the Blue Skyways Collaborative, which focuses on improving air quality in the central U.S. Tulsa has pledged to adopt voluntary measures, using innovative programs, to reduce emissions. Even the proposed purchase of a new city hall site has a greenish tint. Unlike the aging City Hall, the gleaming One Technology Center, 100 S. Cincinnati Ave., is among Tulsa's most energy efficient buildings. The city has projects to recycle medicines and thermometers containing mercury, which help safeguard water supplies.
The city could take another step by encouraging employees and all Tulsans to drink more filtered or unfiltered tap water. Government, a major employer and user of materials, should set the right tone. "Reduce, reuse and recyle is the right order," Patton said. "We should reduce our consumption of bottles by investing in home filters including the inexpensive water pitcher filters. If we use bottles we should refill them. One-time use is not enough. Then, we should recycle bottles. They're too valuable to be in the trash."
About 18 million barrels of oil a year goes into manufacture of plastic bottles -- equivalent to the energy use in 1.1 million homes or the fueling of hundreds of thousands of vehicles. The waste does not stop there. Transporting bottles from afar or even from one point in the U.S. to another, is costly. The water bottle problem could be remedied fairly quickly if consumers were willing to return to tap water or filtered tap water, which is well regulated. Bottled waters have been called the "nectar of the frauds." But there's little evidence to suggest these spring, mineral, purified, distilled, carbonated, oxygenated, caffeinated and vitamin-enriched waters are any better for consumers than tap water, says E magazine. Nearly half of bottled waters are made from tap water anyway. Alaska Premium Glacier Drinking Water, coming from "the last unpolluted frontier," actually came from Public Water System #111241 in Juneau.
"Americans are throwing away 53 million water bottles a day. Eleven-thousand cubic yards of landfill space gone, just for empty bottles, each of which could have been re-used or avoided in the first place." Patton said. "Water is the most abundant natural resource on the planet and is now packaged and transported by using a non-renewable resource. Landfills are constant reminders to our children of our failures as a society. We failed to buy the right amount, failed to choose durable over convenience or cost, and failed to reuse or recycle."
Do we care? Apparently not much. Consider this calculation by Patton: A 16-ounce bottle of water costs a buck. It would cost $8 a gallon or $8,000 for a thousand gallons. The city of Tulsa sells water for $2.17 for 1,000 gallons, delivered. With sales tax, bottled water costs almost exactly 4,000 times more than tap water in Tulsa. "People who buy bottled water overspend, waste precious resources and contribute to mountains of garbage." That's his message in a bottle.
Big gulp.
