Q: What's wrong with drinking bottled water anyway? A: That’s a really tough question because bottled water is riddled with problems. As soon as you dive into one problem, five others pop up.
To make a futile attempt at scratching the surface, bottled water is changing the way we think about water. Bottled water corporations are transforming a public good and a human right into a commodity to be bought and sold on the shelf next to cereal and laundry detergent. When that happens, our environment, our health, and our democracy suffers.
In terms of the environment, bottled water racks up a huge carbon footprint. From manufacturing the plastic for the bottles to transportation, if you calculate how much oil is used it would fill every bottle up 1/4 with petroleum. Gross, right? In New York, these bottles can’t even be recycled. Our friends with Surfrider and a number of other organizations like NYPIRG and Citizens Campaign for the Environment are working on the Bigger Better Bottle Bill to make sure that non-carbonated beverages can be traded in for money to be recycled, but for now, they fill up our landfills and create an enormous amount of non-biodegradable litter.
The health issues have been covered a lot recently by the media. Petroleum-base plastics, like those used for bottled water, can leach carcinogens into the water. Personally, I’d rather not take that risk.
In terms of our democracy, it threatens the political will to sufficiently fund our public water systems. There has been a frighteningly steady decline in funding for water infrastructure. Right now, water infrastructure receives 3% of the funding it needs, creating a 22 billion dollar funding gap between what our public water systems are allocated and what they need. Meanwhile, Americans spend 15 billion dollars a year on bottled water! When we drink bottled water, we’re sending the wrong message about our support for public officials to adequately fund our public water.
The biggest problem, however, isn’t individuals choosing to drink bottled water. It’s bottled water corporations using clever marketing to diminish public confidence in our tap water, then buying up public water sources, bottling the water, and selling it back to us at thousands of times the price. In the midst of a world water crisis where one billion people don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water, we have to ask ourselves, who do we want controlling access to water? Corporations who’s bottom line is profit or or democratically-elected government?
So stop drinking bottled water, but also let your public officials know that you support them resisting corporate control of our water resources!
Could the planet’s rising temperatures and tides be stemmed by something as simple as white paint? Of course not. But according to a soon to be published study in the journal Climatic Change, a few million buckets could buy the world a few crucial years.
Here’s the premise: if all the rooftops and paved surfaces in the world’s major cities were painted white or replaced by more reflective material (like roads made of concrete rather than asphalt), the global cooling effect would be enormous. Big enough, the study shows, to delay climate change by about 11 years.
They started off by calculating that changing a 1,000 square foot roof—the average size on an American home—from black to white would essentially offset the heating effects of 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. (Conveniently, and coincidentally, 10 metric tons is about the amount that a typical American home emits over the course of a year.) And that’s just one building. Collectively, the concentration of hard, dark surfaces causes the “urban heat island” effect, which can make cities an average of 5 degrees Fahrenheit—and up to 20 degrees F—warmer than surrounding areas. And even though cities cover less than 1 percent of the world’s land surface, Dr. Akbari and California Energy Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld, two of the country’s leading experts on urban heat island mitigation, emphasize that the collective impact is significant. A global “cool roofs and cool pavement” strategy, they argue, would increase the global albedo (or reflectivity, if you’ve forgotten your high school physics) enough to reduce planetary warming by the same amount that releasing 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere would increase it.
Read Ben Jervey's post (including cool graphs) at Good.is
An Interview with Micki Josi, Co-Founder of the UFT Green Schools Committee
Q: What is the UFT's Green Schools Committee all about?
A: The UFT Green Schools Committee was formed by two teachers, Coquille Houshour and Micki Josi, in order to encourage the UFT and DOE to adhere to the city’s recycling laws and bring together like-minded teachers who are working to “green” their schools through recycling, composting, and planning lessons on sustainability. Micki and Coquille also have a blog atwww.educatingtomorrow.org.
Q: What are the biggest challenges facing schools who want and must (accoding to NYC law) recycle?
A: Some of the biggest challenges facing schools that want to recycle include is a lack of funds to purchase recycling bins, institutional apathy, lack of public education on recycling including students, staff, and custodial engineers, and infrequent department of sanitation collection. In most cases it is one or more teachers in a school that take this project on voluntarily, writing grants to purchase supplies, and starting students clubs to collect materials and educate their community. Our group does not see this as a sustainable way for the entire Department of Education to adhere to the recycling laws since it relies to heavily on one individual to do a voluntary job, thus nearly 90% of NYC school do not currently recycle.
Q: What is the best piece of advice you can give an educator or parent looking to enforce recycling efforts at their school?
A: Speak up at school about the importance of recycling, find allies, start an environmental club or recycling program. We started out by doing these things so eventually they will want to join our group to meet a network of like-minded individuals who share their passion for recycling and waste reduction education and practices in schools. We think recycling education needs to be mandatory and wasteful practices, such as Styrofoam Trays in the cafeteria, need to be eliminated. It’s hard work if you try to do it alone, but together we can form a strong voice to push for strict regulation of the mandatory recycling laws in schools.
Q: How can folks get involved in your committee or support your efforts in some way?
A: They can contact us through our website www.educatingtomorrow.org. At the website they can read our blog, find resources, sign our petition, email us, join our google group and learn about upcoming meetings and events. They can also contact their local city council person, write a letter to the chancellor and/or mayor to let them know that they think recycling in schools is important and should be a priority.
Thanks Micki
Saturday, January 10 and Sunday, January 11, 2009 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Bring your holiday tree to a designated city park to be recycled into mulch that will nourish plantings across the city! Remember to remove all lights and ornaments before bringing the tree to a Mulchfest site. You are encouraged to bring bags to take advantage of the free mulch provided at sites.
