Rocky wants to deep-six H20 bottles

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson hopes to make his fight against water bottles a national battle.

Anderson, along with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, will sponsor a resolution today at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Los Angeles calling for a study on the impact of bottled water on cities' budgets and waste-disposal systems.

Anderson will not be in L.A. for the conference, but he is still adding his support to the resolution as a sponsor.

In November, when Anderson sent a letter to members of his cabinet asking departments to stop handing out bottled water at meetings and interoffice events, the mayor wrote, "The environmental impacts surrounding the production, shipment and disposal of bottled water do not fit within the city's goal to conduct itself in an environmentally sustainable way."

The letter said more than 1.5 million barrels of oil are used each year to produce plastic water bottles, a number that several environmental Web sites corroborate. In addition, Anderson decried the "tremendous amount of fuel" needed to ship water from where it is bottled to where it is consumed.

The nonprofit group Corporate Accountability International estimates people in the United States currently spend $11 billion yearly on bottled water, a figure it compared to the estimated $22 billion funding shortfall in the country's municipal water infrastructure budgets.

Other cities have attempted to reduce the use of one-use water bottles in their communities. Most recently, Ann Arbor, Mich., announced it would no longer offer bottled water at city-sponsored events.

In Salt Lake City, Anderson's request has met with mixed response. Meetings of such bodies as the City Council and Planning Commission still regularly include bottled water for the officials involved in the meetings. But there has been some reaction from the community, including Kennecott Utah Copper and Kennecott Land, which has stopped using disposable water bottles, spokeswoman Jana Kettering said.

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E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com

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