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Entity reports on why plastic water bottles are as bad as smoking in public.

It’s hard to imagine now, but smoking was once considered healthy by the general public. Men and women smoked regularly. According to The Reports of a Surgeon General – A Brief History, since 1964 when General Luther L. Terry (1956-1961) issued “Smoking and Health,” which was the first Surgeon General’s report to receive widespread media and public attention, smoking has been a habit heavily advised against.

In the present day, we are bombarded with anti-smoking propaganda such as Truth Campaign‘s commercials and grotesque pictures of cancerous lungs on the back of cigarette cartons. Nowadays, cigarettes are commonly known to cause cancer, which is why many colleges have banned them from their campuses to promote a healthier environment. Now, colleges are taking their ban a step further from just tobacco.

According to the University of Vermont’s website, they are the first public college to enact not a ban on smoking, but a ban on plastic water bottles.

Bottled water consumption is big in regions that have access to clean water such as Australia, Europe and the United States. According to Ban the Bottle, The U.S. drank nine billion gallons of bottled water in 2008. Ban the Bottle also says that the production of water bottles uses 17 million barrels of oil per year, and it takes three times the water to make the bottle as it does to fill it.

Not only does it actually waste water to buy bottled water, but it also creates a lot of waste that never gets recycled. According to an article in Business Insider, Doug James, a Professor of Computer Science and Computer Graphics at Cornell University and a recycling advocate, says that the bottled water industry has left 25 billion bottles “landfilled, littered or incinerated.” Furthermore, recycled plastic bottles can only be re-used in non-food products. There aren’t any ways for bottled water to be as environmentally responsible as tap water, which is free and much more regulated than bottled water. The FDA’s regulations for bottled water are not as strict compared to the EDA’s for tap water. This means that bottled water goes through less frequent bacteria testing and the industry isn’t responsible for mandatory reports of violations to federal officials or for complying with filtration and disinfection requirements on the federal level.

With this being said, it’s a wonder that bottled water hasn’t been banned sooner. Well, actually it has.

The University of Nevada implemented a campaign called “Take Back The Tap” back in 2012, and many more universities have since banned water bottles altogether. Instead, campuses are implementing water filling stations for those with reusable water bottles. Although water bottle companies still target college campuses and fight to keep bottled water in circulation, there are more and more schools implementing bottle bans on their campuses.

With this progress, plastic water bottles will soon be seen with the same level of aversion as smoking.

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