Editorial: A fountain of trash

Thursday, June 28, 2007 | 7:23 a.m.

W hen the mayor of San Francisco banned city departments from buying bottled water last week, he opened the proverbial can of worms for those torn between doing what they think is best for their bodies versus what others say is best for the environment.

Mayor Gavin Newsom says he ordered the ban, which goes into effect Sunday, because of environmental concerns. Millions of gallons of crude oil are used to manufacture the almost 30 billion plastic water bottles that Americans purchase each year. And, at the other end of the cycle, more than 1 billion water bottles end up in California's landfills annually, the mayor said a week ago.

Evidently, bottled-water drinkers just aren't trying hard enough. A report released in February by the Container Recycling Institute, a 16-year-old nonprofit group that promotes the recycling and recovery of beverage containers, shows that 144 billion plastic bottles containing all kinds of beverages ended up in landfills, public parks and streams instead of recycling bins nationwide in 2005.

It takes 18 million gallons of crude oil to manufacture the 2 million tons of new plastic bottles that are needed to replace those that are not recycled each year - a figure that does not take into account how much oil is needed to produce new bottles for increased bottled-water demands, the institute's report says.

And the recycling of all types of beverage containers - plastic, glass and aluminum - dropped from 48 percent in 1997 to 33 percent in 2005, the report shows.

A bottle of water has become almost a staple of the average American's wardrobe. People tote them everywhere. But the truth is, some of the water on the market isn't anything more than filtered tap water, which people could produce at home and carry in reusable bottles that are produced and purchased once. Although San Francisco's ban seems extreme, it might just be enough to get people to think twice - not just about how the water inside the bottle affects their bodies, but also about how the bottle affects their environment.