Going bottled water free
On March 21 — the eve of World Water Day — I had the great pleasure of speaking to a large and enthusiastic group of U of T students at an event organized by the Water Working Group. The event featured Dr. Romila Verma, a clean-water advocate from Brock, Debby Danard Wilson, an Anishinaabekwe PhD candidate at OISE, Anne Macdonald, the Director of Ancillary Services at U of T, and Anda Petro and Leanne Rasmussen of the Public Water Initiative here at U of T. The larger issue was the global water crisis, but the reason we came together was to support the call for a bottled water ban at the University of Toronto.
All over North America, students and others are taking the pledge to go bottled water free. To date, 76 municipalities, 4 municipal associations — including the Federation of Canadian Municipalities — 8 school boards, and 21 campuses in Canada have either banned bottled water or established bottled water-free zones. Bottled water sales are down as a result, and a new awareness of the importance of public water is growing.
The bottled water industry is big business. The big four — Coke, Pepsi, Danone and Nestlé — have annual profits of $1.5 billion. It is a highly polluting and toxic industry, with many billions of plastic bottles left behind in landfills, rivers, forests, and oceans every year. Worldwide, 90 per cent of these bottles are not recycled. It also takes large amounts of oil to produce the plastic water bottles and the process of manufacturing and exporting them produces trillions of kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions every year.
http://thevarsity.ca/articles/45036
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