It’s time to ditch plastic bottles and gallon jugs

BY FRANK WAGGONER

Brown University, Harvard University and Cornell University: These are only a handful of universities nationwide that have placed a formal ban on the sale of plastic water bottles on their campuses.

To many of us, buying bottles of water at CharMar or UniMini is not a big deal. Water is, after all, a necessary part of living happily and healthily. It’s true, buying bottled water is convenient and easy. On our campus, bottled water is sold where it is most accessible to students, whether one buys gallon jugs at CharMar or a bottle from a vending machine. This convenience and ease of use may be part of the reason why college campuses are frequently cited among the organizations with the largest and most concentrated contribution to plastic bottle waste in the nation.

Some people don’t like the idea of carrying around a reusable water bottle when they can buy a plastic one just about anywhere. Habits are hard to break, but what if these people knew that bottled water can be up to 2,000 times as expensive as tap water? What if they knew that within a given year, they may waste upwards of $1,400 on bottled water when alternate sources of clean water are readily available to them? These are all facts that when considered, make buying a plastic bottle of water seem a lot less appealing.

The Johns Hopkins University chapter of Take Back the Tap (TBTT) is an on-campus organization focused on eliminating the sale and use of plastic water bottles on campus. Since their creation in 2012, TBTT has made a number of important steps toward this goal. Together, we have initiated the installation of hundreds of water bottle filling stations around campus, made reusable water bottles available to all incoming students, and held a number of informative awareness events. A recent survey conducted by Take Back the Tap revealed that only 22 percent of students at Hopkins buy bottled water on a regular basis, compared to 28 percent in 2012. Although the numbers have dropped, we are still far from being completely independent of bottled water. When asked whether or not they are concerned with environmental issues, the majority of people answer “yes.” At the same time, however, many people do not know how they can make a difference. They believe that decisions made by an individual are so minute that they will have no effects on environmental change in the long run.

At Take Back the Tap, we disagree. We feel that change begins at the individual level. While it may be hard to see how the actions of an individual can make a difference, the actions of a University are immediately impactful. We believe that it’s time our University took a stand. That is why Take Back the Tap is encouraging The Johns Hopkins University to “Ban the Bottle.”

This won’t happen, however, until we as a student body take a stand ourselves.

Banning the bottle starts with you. Whether you’re someone who drinks bottled water or not, it’s going to take cooperation from every student on this campus if we want to make a difference. Most people don’t know that all the tap and utility water in Baltimore has been purified and is completely safe to drink. In fact, most sources of bottled water go through the same purification process as tap water does. In addition to this, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires daily, published water tests on all sources of tap water nationwide. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, which regulates bottled water, only requires unpublished, weekly tests. Despite all this, many students might still complain that tap water tastes “funny” or “metallic.” A simple fix to this problem is to buy a generic water filter and attach it to your tap or to purchase a reusable water bottle with a built-in filter. This adds an additional process of purification and remains economical, environmentally friendly and may help to make your tap water more palatable and refreshing.

So whether it’s to keep the planet or your wallet a little greener, ditch the plastic bottles and the gallon jugs. Buy a reusable bottle, and turn on the tap. Let’s all put a little more thought into our day-to-day decisions and try to keep the Earth a little more clean. With your support, and the cooperation of the Johns Hopkins administration and community, we can ban the bottle on Homewood Campus. It all starts with you.

Frank Waggoner is a sophomore mechanical engineering major from Chicago.