Lost civilization of the Bottle People

"This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water."

This staggering figure should scare all of us into reading the full story, "The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration," by Jon Mooallem, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine (05/27/2007). Where are all those discarded bottles going to go?

The story includes a history of bottle deposit laws in the several states, and a brief history of beverage packaging. It considers whether the cost of recapturing and reusing the plastic from those thirty billion bottles should be borne by the manufacturers, the grocery and convenience stores, municipalities, or consumers.

Each time I volunteer at a race, as I did at the recent inaugural Heels and Hills women's half marathon in Las Colinas, I get all in a dither about the wastefulness of plastic bottles. It's not just running races and soccer tournaments that pile up the empties. The little bottles are taking over planet Earth faster than the tribbles filled the Enterprise.

Imagine this scenario:

Once upon a time no one at all had a bottle of Ozarka constantly at hand, not kings, not peasants, not dragons. No one died for lack of a bottle. Nobody yelled, "My kingdom for a little plastic bottle of pure spring water!" Not even in the heat of battle... Sure, the occasional rube licked the pump handle on a January school recess dare, and got his tongue frozen in situ.

Future archaeologists from a more environmentally-conscientious culture begin digging in our old landfills seeking insights into our alleged civilization. Because of the enormous mounds of plastic containers, the researchers label the period beginning in 1990 as The Bottle People to describe our long-lost throw-away society. The archaeologists would ponder how the high priests of this era convinced the entire population that bottled water was absolutely essential to life as they knew it:

This year, Americans will drink more than nine billion gallons of bottled water, nearly all of it from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastic bottles...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.

When we pay a deposit on a bottle or container, we have "a contract binding us to our garbage":

The bottle bill created an economic incentive for something its authors felt we ought to do for its own sake. It was a mandate to recycle rather than litter but, more broadly, to stay mindful of the tension between convenience and conscientiousness — to stay tethered to our waste as, more and more, that connection slackened.

Let's all meditate a bit on that tension between convenience and conscientiousness. Maybe then we won't become a lost civilization!




© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder