All Bottled Up: Our "Disposable Society"

I was reading this article, The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration
on the New York Times website this morning and was shocked by these details:


Here is a direct link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/magazine/27Bottle-t.html?em&ex=1180497600&en=0ad619333e36f470&ei=5087%0A

Americans buy about 215 billion beverage containers every year, more than quadruple those bought in 1971.

Americans will throw out more than two million tons of PET bottles this year. Even when recycled, it is hard to turn scrap PET into new bottles. More virgin material is always necessary. PET is a petroleum product; it comes from oil. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that 18 million barrels of crude-oil equivalent were needed to replace the bottles we chucked in 2005, bottles that were likely shipped long distances to begin with -from Maine or Calistoga or Fiji.

While recycling advocates rail against society's wastefulness as a solemn problem, so much of that society relies on the freedom to throw things out as a solution to problems. As naïve as it looks, the bottle bill forces the very contemporary environmental question of whether those who sell a product, not to mention those who use it, should be accountable for its mess - and just how accountable, and at what cost. By Day 3 in Salem, one dumbstruck grocer, pressed after his testimony, finally blurted out: "Are we responsible for all the containers and all the garbage we sell?" He meant it as a rhetorical question. But it's precisely the question that, for 36 years, everyone has been getting together to hash out.

For decades, producing glass bottles was so costly that bottlers operated their own deposit systems to ensure they got them back. Beer usually came in glass "stubbies," each with a deposit of a few cents. A stubby could be returned to any local bottler, regardless of its brand. There it was sterilized, scrubbed clean of its label and refilled. A single container could be repurposed as many as 30 times. But by the '60s, aluminum cans were ubiquitous, and glass bottles were shedding their deposits. The convenience of these new "one way," or disposable, containers was marketed enthusiastically. By 1970, nearly 40 percent of America's packaged soda and 75 percent of its packaged beer came in one-ways.

Eric A. Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council describes the first bottle bills emerging at a time when nationalizing markets were making goods more affordable and convenient, but also further detaching consumers from their environmental costs. The one-way soda can is only convenient because we can throw it out when we're finished and don't have to worry where it goes. So is the Bic razor, the paper towel, the disposable camera and the Swiffer mop head. "As significant as the bottle-bill legislation is," Goldstein says, "the growing movement toward a throwaway society that started in the '60s and '70s is an even larger trend."

This year, Americans will drink more than nine billion gallons of bottled water, nearly all of it from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastic bottles. Water, together with other nonfizzy drinks, accounted for 90 percent of the growth of the entire beverage industry between 2002 and 2005. By the end of the decade, they are expected to outsell soda.

Michelle Barry of the market research firm the Hartman Group told me, "Water is not really critically considered" - not even the object itself, it seems. "We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people," she said. "They like to walk around with it and hold it." Increasingly, the typical consumer sips out of a bottle of water "to mark time." "It's like their bangie," Barry added, meaning a security blanket. Or rather, each bottle of water is one in a readily available cast of interchangeable security blankets that we can capriciously acquire and toss throughout the day.