Since the news that Congress is spending nearly a million dollars a year on bottled water, a petition was started to stop this and it was delivered on Tuesday with 65,000 signatures – 50,000 of which were obtained by change.org.
Hopefully everyone who felt strongly about asking Congress to stop spending money on bottled water was able to sign the petition, but it’s not too late to tell Congress you want to eliminate bottled water purchases from the budget. The more people that sign – the more impact it has.
Reasons you should sign the petition and reason congress should stop the habitual drinking of bottled water.
- When the total costs of bottled water are divided amongst member of Congress, it’s nearly $2000 per member! Who spends $2000 on bottled water a year? Most Americans cannot afford that, why should Congress members get that? It’s just absurd! In fact, it doesn’t even seem reasonable. Are they actually extremely concerned about hydration and drinking approximately 5 bottles of water a day, or is there just a lot of bureaucracy overhead costs? Either way, an unbelievable indulgence.
- Bottled water is a huge marketing gimmick – manufactured demand – to make people think that tap water is unsafe and that they should buy ‘pure’ water in a bottle. You can read about why this isn’t necessarily true here. Since I can’t say it any better myself, I’ll quote Wenonah Hauter from Food and Water Watch:
“Bottled water is an elaborate scam designed to strike fear among the public that tap water is somehow unsafe to drink. This is a real opportunity for members of Congress to step up and demonstrate their faith in public tap water systems by slashing spending on wasteful, unnecessary bottled water from their budgets.”
- The environmental impact of that number of bottles is not small. With something as small as a bottle of water, people sometimes don’t think much of it, but they add up! Every year, billions of bottles from water are disposed of improperly. They leach chemicals into the environment because the sunlight and element change the plastic. Often, these bottles end up in impoverish countries, not the developed countries that use them, and contaminate their environment.
Sign the petition and spread the word by sharing this post or the petition link.
Sources: Get Congress off the Bottle
Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons by stevendepolo
