COMMENTARY
August 8, 2007

Recycled Water Bottles Save Money, Landfill Space

As printed in the North County Times on August 8, 2007

By Supervisor Pam Slater-Price, Third District

Far be it for me to tell people where they should get their drinking water – it’s a personal choice.

I like filtered tap water, but I have been known to sport a purchased bottle of water.

But recent media coverage got me thinking about bottled water and the need for a stronger effort to encourage recycling to save money on cleaning up litter and increasing the life expectancy of our landfills.

Years ago, I would have thought people crazy for buying water in a bottle from a store. How silly! Perfectly good potable water comes from our faucets.

But times have changed and most everyone fills their shopping carts with pallets of bottled water from the ever expanding section of water and water-based products.

It’s what happens to those plastic bottles after the supermarket purchase and the eventual use that gets me thinking.

The County of San Diego spends $400,000 annually cleaning up litter along unincorporated roads and water bottles are contributors to this problem. Let’s break that number down. The cost of trash pick-up works out to more than $1,095 daily.

Obviously, that’s not all water bottles.

But, consumers who throw water bottles out their car windows or toss it in with the regular trash are making us all pay for that bottle – twice; once by them, and once by us for clean-up.

If you’re like me, you recycle. But only about 14 percent of the nation is with us. A nationwide report shows that plastic water bottles create 2 million tons of trash in our landfills.

All California jurisdictions have 50 percent landfill diversion goals and the County of San Diego meets that goal. Yet, 6 percent of the Miramar Landfill volume is plastic.

Recycling options include crushing your plastic and depositing it curbside in a recycling container next to your regular trash container – which is pretty easy. If you don’t have a recycling container, you can request one or go to a recycling center to collect your bottle deposit (check out www.bottlesandcans.com).

Recycled plastic does have uses – it can become polyester fiber used to make carpet flooring and even polar fleece clothing. Doesn’t that sound comfy?

Recycling plastic could help your quality of life, too.

The Container Recycling Institute calculates that if the nationwide average of beverage container recycling were 80 percent, the savings would be the emissions equivalent of taking 2.4 million cars off the road a year.

The Institute also says that if the recycling content of plastic beverage bottles was 25 percent nationwide, that would save enough crude oil to run electricity in 680,000 American homes a year.

What I like about recycling plastic bottles is that it saves on waste. Nothing bothers me more than seeing trash along roadways or in our county parks. Plus, recycling centers provide lots of jobs for the economy.

I realize no change comes easily, unless the change itself isn’t that difficult. And if we thought about it, we could all do a little more to reduce our trash output simply by recycling.

Supervisor Pam Slater-Price represents the County of San Diego’s Third District.