It's not just about plastic water bottles

My hunch is that Americans will do whatever is in their best interest, economically and otherwise. Lecturing them won't help.

In recent weeks, Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson has launched a crusade against bottled water. He's not alone. Anderson joined the mayors of San Francisco and Minneapolis in passing a resolution through the U.S. Conference of Mayors calling for study of how bottled water is impacting city budgets.

Indeed, water bottles seem to be all the rage in certain environmental circles. What once was chic is now as uncool as a pack of Kools.

Well, I'm here to tell you that Anderson and his fellow mayors are right. Water bottles do exact an environmental price, both in the way they are manufactured and in the way they are disposed. It is a little hard to understand, however, why just water bottles are getting all the attention (other than some vague and strange-sounding hints they might be hurting municipal water budgets — that darned free-enterprise system again!).

Walk through the aisles of your local grocery store. Count the products that come in plastic containers. In addition to water, you'll find just about every beverage imaginable, including milk. You'll find margarine, laundry detergent, motor oil — even coat hangers come in plastic and are durable and cheap. When you pay for all these plastics at the checkout, chances are the cashier will hand you a plastic bag that one day, inevitably, will end up circling the landfill like a parachute.

I recently sat down with John Ioannou, executive director of Salt Lake Valley Solid Waste Management. He drew a contrast for me. If we had gone to any landfill a few decades ago and started digging, he said, we would have found a lot of tires, dead batteries and metal waste. If we went to one today, we'd find a lot of plastic. America has become a plastic society.

And small wonder. Plastic is cheap, light and durable. That means a beverage company can ship much more actual beverage on its trucks at a smaller weight than it could before, resulting in cheaper products for consumers.

Ioannou said it's too early to really understand the impacts of all of this. "The weight (of plastics) is insignificant," he said. "But the volume is huge. You can't really pack it down because it tends to spring back. It doesn't break down. This stuff will be there for a zillion years."

But it is recyclable.

Ioannou described a recent visit to the Salt Lake Arts Festival. He saw three receptacles next to each other. One was for trash. One was for paper. And one was for recyclable cans and bottles. He watched as most people put things in their proper place. Then he saw someone take a cob of corn he had been eating and throw it in with the cans and bottles.