Bottled water ban

The use of plastics continues to rise in our daily lives due to its convenience and cheap price. But the cost that is not obvious to many is the environmental and health impacts they are leaving behind.

Plastics are made from fossil fuels. The use of these leaves a large ecological footprint on the environment, not to mention that this plastics do not break down easily, if at all.

The overuse of plastics results in a dumping of plastics into our oceans at a rate of 8 million tons per year. The pilling up of plastics around the world continues to build up and now will facing issues like the Great Pacific garbage patch. Scientists now have estimated that at the rate will continue to dump plastics into our oceans, by 2050 there will have more plastic than fish in our oceans.

Additional to environmental impacts, plastics are known to leave behind chemicals detrimental to human health such as the neurotoxin Bisphenol A (also known as BPA). Other chemicals in plastics have even been linked to causing cancer.

For these reasons some governments are interested in banning the use of single-use plastic water bottles in their regions to lower these impacts on the environment and promote sustainability within their boundaries.

Bottled water bans have been proposed and enacted in several municipalities and campuses around the world, over such concerns as resource wastage, transportation emissions, plastic litter, and damage to affected aquifers.

The small town of Bundanoon, New South Wales (Australia) enacted such a ban in 2009 and believes it was the first government to do so anywhere. The University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington became the first public college to enact such a ban. As of late 2016, 82 high schools, colleges and universities across the world have implemented bottled water bans on their campuses. Municipalities have also banned bottled water from their facilities, such as the city of San Francisco, California.

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Wikipedia