A law passed by the town of Concord, in the US state of Massachusetts, went into effect with the New Year, making single-serving bottles of water illegal. However, Coke or other soft drinks are exempt, it only applies to non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water. The ban is intended to encourage use of tap water and curb the worldwide problem of plastic pollution. Sanctions for now include first time warning and a second offend will be fined $25, and $50 thereafter.

Developed nations such as the US spend billions of dollars buying bottled water and the plastic bottles that this water comes in create billions of pounds of oil based trash destined to live out a thousand year lifespan in a trash dump. In one year, 318 billion bottles of water are consumed. Major cities in America have made recycling available but only 1 in 5 water bottles ever gets recycled – 4 go to the trash dump to create about 3 billion pounds of waste just from all of the discarded plastic. This leads to an unseen global waste catastrophe. Many researchers and environmental organizations now list plastic as the number one threat to our marine environments around the planet. Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!

Reusable bottle comparison table (Credit: Back2Tap)

Disposable plastic water bottles are made out of oil which is a finite natural resource. Plastic bottles require energy to make and transport. It takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce bottled water – enough oil to fuel 1 million cars for a whole year. Luckily tap water is very cheap because it takes about 3 times the amount of tap water to produce and fill 1 bottle of bottled water.

One bottle of water takes over 700 years to decompose. The production of plastic water bottles in the U.S. alone creates 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas.

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