Bottles Add Up

While Marco Rubio’s distracting water slugging during his State of the Union “rebuttal” elicits chuckles and charges of cottonmouth, we gasp at the container holding his drink.   A little plastic bottle of water is not innocent! As evidenced in the “Plastic! Plastic! Plastic!” essay in the fall issue of “Fresh Dirt,” about 40% of the earth’s oceans are covered in debris, and most of it plastic.  Every piece of plastic that ever existed still exists. Some of it is in smaller pieces, some of it is in the stomachs of sea creatures, but none of it has biodegraded.

If Capitol Hill staffers are going out and buying cases of water, I hope they’re at least going to Costco where employees make a living wage, but since bottled water seems to be the default, maybe truckloads of these water bottles are automatically delivered. If individuals on Capitol Hill are afraid of drinking the tap water, that’s something they could think about changing.   While they work on making that fear of free tap water irrelevant, implementing filtration systems for their drinking water would most likely result in expenditures totaling less than the approximately $860,000  Capitol Hill currently spends on bottled water per year.