Should Bottled Water Be Banned On Martha's Vineyard Beaches?

I originally posted this to the Tisbury Turkey website blog, but given the recent discussion about beach trash, I thought I would re-post it here. I don't know that a bottled water ban would be welcome or even feasible on Martha's Vineyard, but it sure makes for an interesting question. Bans have been successfully implemented in some parks and on college campuses, but are generally hotly contested.

Oh Big H2O, We Are On To You...

Corporate Accountability International has launched a campaign to ban bottled water from national parks. While a ban sounds extreme, the severity of the plastic waste problem (which has been haunting me since I recently wrote about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) might warrant extreme action. A ban on disposable bottles in national parks would be a bold move, but making public water available to park visitors would benefit both our wallets and the environment. There are a handful of parks that have successfully phased-out bottled water already, and according to bottle-ban proponent Annie Leonard, the impact is impressive:

Parks like these are both positively informing the way the public thinks about water — that it is a shared resource, like our parks, not a commodity — and significantly reducing their waste in the process. Up to 20 percent of Grand Canyon National Park’s overall waste stream came from plastic bottles before the phase out.

It wasn't that long ago that drinking from taps and fountains was de rigueur, after all, before Big Water convinced us otherwise.

Think outside the bottle: Ban bottled water at National Parks [Global Exchange Blog]