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On June 22, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (D) announced he had issued an executive order that the city will no longer pay for bottled water where tap water is available. This order will apply to all city employees and to city contractors under contracts stipulating that bottled water would eventually be paid for by the city. We applaud Newsom for initiating one of the first major blows to what we see as a pernicious trend against the environment and against those who work so hard to provide this country with the purest and best water systems on the planet.
Bottled water has been around for generations. In the classic 1942 movie Casablanca, Claude Raines, as French colonial police Captain Renault, can be seen at the end tossing a bottle of Vichy mineral water in the trash and then kicking it as he decides to ally with the Free French Forces against the Nazis and collaborating Vichy France. But perhaps the watershed in the bottled-water industry was a widely published photo of Princess Diana of England some 20 years ago emerging from a health club toting a bottle of Evian. The bottled-water boom took off.
Where has this led? Bottled water is everywhere: at home, in the office and in backpacks on the bus and subway. It is more expensive than gasoline, yet no one seems to complain. It's a sad irony that, at meetings where participants debate how to improve the environment, they do not blink an eye that everyone at the table is drinking bottled water.
What is the cost? In Mayor Newsom's executive order, he claims that supplying plastic water bottles requires more than 47 million barrels of oil a year, and that California landfills are forced to absorb more than one-billion nonbiodegradable plastic water bottles annually.
But even more pernicious is the marketing of bottled water. Tap water is no good, the marketers imply or even state outright. On the other hand, who can resist the image of drinking crystal-pure glacier water. Of course, anyone who has ever seen glacier water, which generally has the look and consistency of thin spoiled milk, would be repelled by the notion.
The marketing also gives the public one more excuse to ignore or take for granted the infrastructure that brings the water that comes out of the tap. More people drinking tap water means more people who will care about its quality. This will lead to the political demand and, we hope, the political will to spend the money required to keep America's drinking water the best in the world.
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