Jay Fisette, the recently elected vice chairman of the Arlington County Board, has pledged to begin an education-focused campaign against the use of plastic water bottles. He says he plans on addressing the issue on an more individual basis, rather than trying to get the General Assembly to enact an all out ban–a goal he considers impossible given current administrations. Instead, Fisette will launch a campaign targeted at educating citizens. A major points of interest will be that although the quality of bottled water is not regulated, it costs more than 1000 times more than tap water, which is federally regulated. The cost is also two to four times higher than the price of gasoline.
It takes about 17million barrels of gasoline to produce the plastic for bottled water each year. Very few of those bottles actually get recycled, and since it takes about 700 years for the bottles to decompose, they take up space in landfills, and have a big impact on environmental health. Fisette is asking individual citizens to be mindful and to cut back on their use of bottled water.
