Cities Cut Spending on Bottled Water

Good news in the fight against bottled water—increasingly, cities are reducing their spending on the environmentally damaging beverage. A meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors revealed the details of a national survey that showed just how much cities were slashing their spending on bottled water.

Recently, Colorado's governor issued an executive order to cut spending on bottled water and so did the governors of New York, Illinois, and Virginia. But the backlash against bottled water really was ignited about three years ago when San Francisco's Gavin Newsom became the first mayor of a large city to cut the city's bottled water contracts. In a city with safe and delicious tap water piped in from Hetch Hetchy out by Yosemite, Newsom smartly realized that promoting local tap water was a better idea. He also is saving taxpayers an estimated $500,000 a year by eliminating bottled water spending by the city.

After Newsom, Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson of Salt Lake City and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak also got on board. They brought a resolution to the U.S. Conference of Mayors back in 2007 to study the impact of bottled water on the waste stream and to phase out spending on bottled water. An estimated 86 percent of single-use plastic bottles are not recycled—they end up littering our streets and waterways and clogging our landfills.

The U.S Conference of Mayors survey found that, out of the 101 cities who participated, 72 percent of them have considered either getting rid of or reducing bottled water bought for city facilities. Another 45 percent said that "promoting public water" was their motivating reason; and 44 percent have already taken action to phase out city spending on bottled water.

While most cities are focusing on water used only at city facilities (which is bought-and-paid-for by tax-payers), the town of Concord, MA went one step further, voting last month to ban the sale of bottled water entirely. Businesses are also taking up the cause: Years ago, Berkeley's Chez-Panisse became one of the first restaurants to eliminate bottled water, and many other eateries from gourmet to down-home have joined up since then.

Reducing the amount of bottled water we use helps cut back on petroleum, carbon emissions, and of course, waste. It also helps protect ecosystems in rural areas where spring water is mined, often with little regulation on how much water can be pumped. Instead of spending money on bottled water, we should be directing our efforts to making sure all of our water infrastructure is properly maintained and that everyone has clean, affordable water coming from their taps.

Photo credit: Klearchos Kapoutsis