Chicago’s Loyola University became the latest university in the region to ban campus bottled water sales, the Chicago Sun Times recently reported.
The paper said that a student group notes: “We consider the sale of bottled water on campus in conflict with the Jesuit tradition and Loyola’s mission ‘to be in service of humanity through learning, justice and faith.”
Great Lakes Echo recently wrote how campus bottled water bans – and the establishment of water bottle filling stations – appear to be increasing regionally and nationally.
At the same time, bottled water manufacturers are pushing back, noting that bans restrict the freedom to choose an alternative to less healthy drinks that continue to be sold on campuses.
thank you students! I agree with you. This is not “Hitlersque”(?) – Karen Did you even read the article? Water is still available, it’s just not available in disposable plastic single serving bottles shipped in from somewhere else, maybe even out of the country, and re-sold at outrageous profit. They have provided water stations so people can fill their own reusable containers. Whatever happened to good old drinking fountains? I survived my college years without bottled water for goodness sake!
from the article that you didn’t read:
Instead, reusable bottles have been distributed, and 35 bottle refill stations have been installed.
The ban is the culmination of a two-year campaign by students who were troubled by every aspect of bottled water – the global environmental hazard of 1.5 million tons of plastic waste each year, the depletion of good drinking
water in some regions as it is bottled up and shipped elsewhere, and the symbolism of callous extravagance in a world in which many people have no access to clean water.
I cannot believe that a college would do this. It is taking away freedom again, this O regime is Hitleresque.
So the water bottlers that PRODUCE the “less healthy drinks” are now sad that students won’t have an alternative? Yes, they will, and it’ll be free instead of costing more than gasoline or milk: the water from the drinking fountain. Buy something that comes in a glass bottle, like tea, and keep refilling that. We’ve used the same ones for years now. If, as a little girl, someone had sent me forward in time, then asked what surprised me most, it would be that people ended up duped into paying the same amount for a bottle of water as a bottle of pop. And actually, I consider pop to be bottled water, with unhealthy ingredients added.