plastic bottles

Students of the Glen Rock High and Middle Schools of New Jersey are practicing sustainability in a very real way, as a new device recently installed on campus encourages students to make use of a resource that they have readily available to them -- clean tap water. According to a report on North Jersey, new water fountain units that include a station for carbon-filtered, clean water to refill reusable bottles have been installed, giving students the ability to bring their own bottles to school.

By Marion Nestle

BPA plastics are banned from the European market, only to be replaced by other plastics that seem to have their own problems. These are detailed in three articles in Food Additives and Contaminants dealing with the migration of ...Read More.

By Mike Verespei, Plastic News

WASHINGTON (Dec. 2, 4:45 p.m. ET) -- A just-released email says the director of the National Park Service feared there would be “consequences” from Coca-Cola Co. if NPS went ahead with a proposed ban on the sale of single-use plastic water bottles at the Grand Canyon.

One year ago the state of New York (with the help of NE Region Surfrider chapters!) instituted the “Bottle Bill” – essentially a bottle-deposit on plastic bottles. According to Surfrider’s NE Regional Manager, John Weber, “If you believed the critics of bottle bill expansion, it was all gloom and doom, the economy was going to grind to a halt, overtaxed consumers were going to end up in the poorhouse, etc, etc. As you can see the actual results were a little different.”

By Scott Harrison, Rise Above Plastics Well...*part* of Italy has banned plastic water bottles - the Cinque Terre (Five Lands) scenic region on the country's northwest coastline. Cinque Terre is recognized on the Unesco World Heritage list of environmental and cultural conservation sites, and the Italians want to keep it that way.

Inspired by the movie "Addicted to Plastic" a six-store grocery chain on the east coast is banning the sale of bottled water in their stores, installing in-store water filtration systems and eliminating unnecessarily-bagged produce.