I have often wondered the same thing. A little off-topic, but sometimes I wonder why parents have to have huge bags for their toddlers and young children always at hand. Snacks & drinks galore. Can’t these kids wait for something ever? And the refreshments for meetings and seminars? Why do grown adults need breakfast pastries, then “box lunches” which have sandwich AND chips AND cookie? Instant gratification hasn’t been a good policy for our society in so many ways! One reason why we have the exploding obesity rate!</p>
<p>“It does seem silly, however, to ban bottles of water while still allowing bottles of Coke and tea and juice”</p>
<p>Coke, tea, and juice don’t flow from taps (for the most part). However, more and more schools are encouraging students to get these drinks from fountains with reusable cups. Fountains are better because it takes less energy and far fewer containers to transport concentrate than ready-to-drink beverages. (They are made from concentrate at the bottling plant anyway, so the quality is no different.)</p>
<p>My old dorm dining room has the juice and soda fountains available all the time, and has a service where you can leave your travel cup in the dishroom after a meal and they’ll wash it for you and hang it by the drink dispensers. This cuts down on using the vending machines for soft drinks, and also on disposable cups for bringing coffee/tea with you in the morning.</p>
I’m showing my age, but there was a time when people said things like, “He’s so persuasive he can sell a bottle of water”. I think it was in the seventies that the bottled water market took off in some third world countries where tap water all too often was contaminated, and there was a reason to go bottled. As you observed, what happened in the US really speaks volumes for companies’ marketing skills. Started with Perrier, glacier water etc, culminating in plain old water from the reservoir down the hill.</p>
<p>I can see the objections to the trend on the campuses - so it’s OK to sell sugar-and-chemical water, but not plain harmless water, right? I personally think it’s better to levy a “tax” so that people who have to have it can pay for the privilege.</p>
<p>It’s about waste reduction not health benefits in the immediate sense. Most people don’t drink as much pop as they would water. However, pop is made with the local municipal water source as well. Pop is bottled close to the market as water is the heavy, ubiquitous input.</p>
<p>It really should be up to a person to decide what to buy and drink. All these banning will not work, they just going to hide it. You can always re-fill your container from the bottled water instead of yukky tasting warm water from re-fill station, which probably breads ton of bad stuff being warm. OK, this whole ban is a skam the way I see it. They “save” on waste to make many sick?
The best is to use filtered water from container stored in fridge, IMO. We bought one for our D. We do not even change filter when it is due, it still works, you can judge by taste very easily. I refuse to drink warm water from re-fill station, not sure what else I would consume in addition to this water.</p>
<p>I was very lucky to grown up in a city that had the most amazing tap water. I didn’t realize this was not the norm until I moved to a municipality 15 miles away. After pouring my first glass of tap…I figured the glass had somehow not been washed properly since it tasted so awful. Also, a glass of tap left to sand overnight made drinking from the pool seem very appealing. Anyway, we’ve had reverse osmosis systems in our homes ever since.</p>
<p>DS HS installed one of those filtered systems where they can have reusable water bottles refilled. I’ve encouraged him not to use it…</p>
<p>Yes, these do not reference public water sources specifically, but the technology and inherent ickness is still the same. DS brings 2-3 sparkling water bottles with him each day - which then go into either our or the schools recycling containers.</p>
<p>After using the spill proof coffee cups currently so popular - and then one day looking at the spout AFTER a trip through the dishwasher - and seeing MOLD…I’m not a big fan of these either. We do still use them but on a regular basis run Clorox through the lid.</p>
<p>As for the ban…well…if someone feels strongly about not using bottled water…there is not as of yet a mandatory bottled water drinking enforcement department…so don’t if you don’t want too…but also don’t force a ban on others just to feel good about yourself.</p>
<p>Bottled water may be the biggest scam since the founding of the free enterprise system. Consumers pay a heavy premium to get a product they assume is “pure,” yet most bottlers make no representation that it is cleaner than ordinary tap water, nor do government regulators require that it is. A lot of bottled water is just ordinary tap water, bottled and shipped to your locality. Some of it is put through a simple filtration system before bottling, which gets it about as clean as a home Brita water filter would get it; this is marketed as “purified” water, which sells at a big mark-up. Some is sold as “spring water” which many people assume implies a special level of purity and freshness, but in fact under federal regulatory standards the “spring water” label doesn’t imply anything about its purity and doesn’t even mean it came from an actual spring; it only means it came from an aquifer in which it would have eventually found its way to the surface through artesian pressure. “Spring water” can be as polluted as any water on the planet, and it sometimes is. An exhaustive 4-year study by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that most bottled water was safe, but 22% of the brands tested contained, in at least one sample, at least one contaminant at levels above state health limits for tap water (which don’t apply to bottled water). In other words, there’s no assurance that bottled water is any cleaner than ordinary tap water, and in many cases it is just ordinary tap water. There are also some health concerns about endocrine-disrupting chemicals released by the plastic bottles themselves, especially if the water is stored in those bottles for extended periods; your public water supply system is required to keep those chemicals below regulatory standards in your tap water, but no such regulatory standards apply to bottled water. Then, of course, there’s the environmental cost of hauling all that water around the country and around the world. NRDC estimates that in New York City alone, shipments of bottled water from Europe release 3,800 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. And although the bottles are recyclable, it’s estimated that only 13% get recycled; 2 million tons of them end up in landfills annually.</p>
<p>And for this consumers are paying, what, $2 per 16 ounce bottle, or $8 per gallon? That’s more than you pay for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gasoline—and it’s just water, for Pete’s sake. That comes out to about $2.6 million per acre-foot (an acre-foot is the amount of water it would take to fill an acre of land a foot deep). The price of tap water varies by state and by community but generally ranges from a few dollars per acre foot to a few hundred dollars per acre foot. Nice business; the bottler takes a commodity that is free or almost free, puts it in a plastic bottle, slaps a label on it showing snow-capped peaks and a mountain stream, ships it across the country (mostly likely by fume-spewing diesel truck) and sells it to the consumer at an insanely high mark-up, when in all likelihood the consumer could get that same commodity of comparable quality for almost nothing simply by turning on the tap in her own home.</p>
<p>I do not care scam or not, I do not care to buy it either, too much trouble. The fact is it does not smell chlorine, it tells me that it is filtered, it is NOT straight tap water. I trust my own nose much more than anybody opinions / articles / statistics and other sources of info. My nose has served me well so far.</p>
<p>dietz: One article that you reference is about automatic hand washing stations in the bathrooms not drinking fountains and the other is about soda dispensers. What do either of those have to do with the safety of refilling a reusable water bottle at the regualar old fashioned drinking fountain or one of the newer bottle filling station type fountains?</p>
<p>Also . . . generally speaking, there is a big difference between BANNING bottled water and just not selling it at campus facilities. It’s not like universities have a water police that will write up a ticket for using a bottle. You are welcome to buy your own. They are trying to encourage awareness and gradual change in attitudes and expectations by not providing it on campus.</p>
<p>It is pretty silly that universities are involved in such a thing. I hope none in my state spending my tax money on this. Are college kids are 6 y o? Very silly…</p>
<p>…and build some re-fill stations with disgusting water and advertise that bottle water is banned, and it does not happened out of air, it has been discussed by people who are paid much more than min. salary. There is no such thing as a free lunch, I know that much economics, actually do not need to know much more than that. I just wish more people is aware of this law.</p>
<p>Post 89 is correct. But my H is still going to buy bottled water because it simply tastes better. No matter how much of a scam it is. I drink tap water from my own faucet but at my sister’s house and mom’s I would opt for bottled any time. Maybe it depends more on where you live.
Or maybe the convenience of having cold water in a disposable bottle that doesn’t make it taste like plastic is the real trick. Not enough water fountains give cold water.
The new fountains that dispense to water bottles are nice because at least you know (hopefully) that nobody’s put their mouth all over it. Now for cold water and a non-plastic-y container.</p>
<p>MiamiDAP–Limited resources–really, have you checked the endowments at these schools??? Again, I’ve been to a few of these campuses, they are nice systems that are just an extra spigot on a drinking fountain.</p>
<p>No, I did not check how much of “endowments at these schools” are spent on this topic, I really do not care. IMO, all of them should be spent on something more deserving, but I am nobody, they are free to do whatever.
" …still going to buy bottled water because it simply tastes better" - filtered water taste better to me, but everybody has different taste. Bottled water requires too much effort, but exercise is a good thing, it is pretty heavy when you buy a bunch at the store, so here you go, no more osteoporosis!</p>
<p>saintfran: Public water refill stations - (now a high tech drinking fountain), public soda machines and public automatic faucets all have a common denominator - a very effective germ distribution system. Take your personal reusable container, with all the associated saliva and…other body fluids…and it’s easy to see how quickly the ickies can spread. When someone unscrews the top of a refillable container, everything on their hands gets to transfer to the container, now the container comes in contact with the refill device and …germ fest. It’s a bit odd that in a time when we’re adding anti-microbial agents to toys and other items, when hand sanitizers have become a necessary components in diaper bags, cars and purses…that we would migrate towards something that’s so rife with the potential to spread colds, the flue, and other illnesses.</p>