so much effin' fun!!?!: idg why my friends are so exasperated that the university of toronto...
idg why my friends are so exasperated that the university of toronto has banned selling bottled water
okay our university has 147 buildings and is the size of a small city. do u kno how much natural resources we are already using up!!! i really don’t think it would kill you to bring a reusable…
Sorry, Em, gotta disagree with you entirely on this one.
I am exasperated because I live in an apartment where we actually need to use bottled water because we don’t even want to KNOW what’s going on with our century-old plumbing. So I don’t carry around empty refillable water bottles that are only useful when I’m on campus.
And where are these filling stations, exactly? Not in the buildings where I have classes — it would ruin their old world charm. All the bottled water ban has achieved in my case is to cause me and other students to funnel more money into the pockets of the Coca-Cola corporation.
Bottled water bans piss me off because they are literally the minimal amount an institution can do to appear more “green,” and it’s such an obvious branding move. It also puts the onus to be “green” on students and employees by being all Big Brother about their choices rather than fixing the university’s infrastructure. You know what would have been a “greener” move on U of T’s part? How about not accepting $35 million dollars from Peter fucking Munk and then naming a building after him?
Derrick Jensen talks about this in “Forget Shorter Showers” which I can’t link properly ‘cause I’m on my phone, but you can find it here: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/
MY environmental choices on water are negligible when 90% of water use is from big industries. Sure, you could mount the argument that consumers create these companies — but I’m not down with blaming the flaws of capitalism on the people it screws over.
On a personal note, Emma, let’s remember the stunning amount of bottled water we consume up at our parents’ cottage — we even use it to cook, because we’re too good to drink the perfectly potable water in a lake that’s 20 feet away, which has been tested a million times and is safe to drink. But I don’t like the taste of lake water, and neither do you (I don’t think, at least). Just something to consider, given that the average bottled water drinker probably uses less botled water than either of us does in a year.
