That discarded water bottle will still be there 1000 years from now! Unfortunately it’s in our National Parks.
Plastic water bottles are handy, easy to make, inexpensive, easy to refrigerate, and lightweight. And easy to discard, right? Wrong.
They are not reusable (the polymers break down and become toxic), 2 million tons of plastic water bottles now fill our landfills. They too will be there for a 1000 years.
THEY ARE RECYCLABLE.
Two years ago, Subaru, a Japanese car maker, initiated a Natl Parks Program to eliminate discarded waste especially plastic water bottles. It was working until the Rump Administration got a hold of it.
Cherry Hill, NJ – June 8, 2015 – Subaru, recognized for having the first automotive assembly plant in America designated as zero landfill, today announced it will share its knowledge of zero landfill practices with the National Park Service to reduce landfill waste from the parks. In partnership with National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a non-profit national park advocacy group, the team will test zero landfill practices in three iconic national parks –Yosemite, Grand Teton and Denali – working toward a goal of significantly reducing waste going into landfills from all national parks. This sustainability initiative builds upon Subaru of America’s multi-year partnership with the National Park Foundation (NPF) celebrating the centennial of the National Park Service and the Find Your Park movement.
In 2013, the National Park Service managed more than 100 million pounds of waste nationally. Much of this waste was generated in the parks by its 273.6 million visitors. That amount of trash would normally require 20 million household trash bags which if laid end-to-end would stretch from New York to Los Angeles and back again twice. This total accounts for only the waste managed by the National Park Service and does not account for the waste managed by park concessioners, which is considerably higher. Concessioners provide park visitors with lodging, transportation, food services, shops, and other services.
Also in 2013, more than seven million people visited the pilot parks – Yosemite, Grand Teton and Denali – which collectively generated 16.6 million pounds of visitor waste. Of that amount, 6.9 million pounds was diverted from landfill via source reduction, reuse, recycling or composting, and 9.7 million pounds was sent to landfill. By learning from experts at Subaru, the parks and concessioners hope to further reduce waste to landfills, as well as better educate visitors to lessen their environmental footprint within the parks
Albeit in receipt of a report saying the program was working Rump Admin fell to lobbyists from Nestle (water bottler) and Big Petroleum (bottle makers) to stop the program.
This from Corporate Accountability International:
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We just got our hands on a report from the National Park Service detailing exactly how successful the bottled-water-free policy has been. It has prevented up to 2 million plastic bottles from being discarded per year. It proves what we've known for years: this policy stops plastic waste from destroying our beautiful national parks. That's why hundreds of thousands of people like you have urged national parks to buck the bottle.
And news outlets from The Washington Post to the Guardian are covering this report because it was dated May 2017, months BEFORE the Trump administration rescinded this successful policy. That’s outrageous and we need to expose the bottled water industry for its extreme interference.
The bottled water industry has run a years-long campaign against this commonsense policy, all to protect its bottom line. The fact that Trump administration officials knew the benefits of this policy in May but still decided to rescind it last month is a clear case of the bottled water industry’s lobbying dollars at work.
The bottled water industry may see a powerful ally in the Trump administration -- including individuals like Deputy Secretary of the Department of Interior David Bernhardt, who has ties to bottled water giant Nestlé -- but our campaign has hundreds of thousands of people like you powering it. And we’re not going to back down.
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Please recycle your plastic water bottles and please vote for a new Administration.