EDITORIAL: Bring Your Own Bottle

The environment is a hot topic lately — excuse the global warming pun. And everyone’s favorite city that’s right outside our doors, Brookline, is looking to get a head start on one of the conservation’s most debated issues.

At a Brookline Town Hall meeting on April 7, Brookline Town Meeting Caucus Chairwoman Jane Gilman and co-sponsor Clint Richmond brought up a proposal to ban plastic bottles from the city. Brookline has already banned plastic bags and polystyrene containers from their city limits, so why not water bottles?

Concord, Massachusetts did it back in 2013, when the city banned single-serving water bottles less than one liter. That means you can buy water bottles in bulk from the grocery store, but you aren’t able to get water bottles in vending machines. And in 2014, San Francisco, one of the most progressive cities in the country, banned plastic water bottles from being sold on city property. You can no longer buy water bottles in San Francisco government buildings or public schools.

Brookline’s proposal is similar to San Francisco’s ban. If it got the support it needed, it would ban anything or anyone sponsored by the city from selling water in plastic bottles. A reusable water bottle would become a necessity when taking your dog for a walk in the park or sending your child to public school.

“We didn’t have plastic bottles before. It’s just a habit of convenience,” Gilman told The Boston Globe. “We can learn to do without them.”

However, not everyone in the Town Hall meeting agreed with Gilman’s sentiment. Although it may be fairly shocking for a city that seems to be on the fringe of environmental cautiousness, the proposal was met with refusal.

Although this plan may seem like a good idea on the surface, there are many reasons Brookline can’t just rush into a water bottle ban. Convenience may be just one factor, but it’s a very important factor. If only plastic bottles for water are banned, who’s to say people won’t get lazy and, with a lack of water refill stations around, just get a soda from the vending machine instead? Coke will still be allowed to be in plastic bottles, but the healthier option won’t.

In addition, Brookline’s infrastructure just isn’t strong enough to serve its entire population with a healthy amount of water. Of course, the city could turn to “portable hydration stations” like we have here on campus, but that’s not exactly a cheap and easy solution. Only about a quarter of public spaces, the places that would be affected by the plastic bottle ban, have the capacity to provide citizens with enough water, the Globe reported.

Alan Balsam, Brookline’s director of public health and human services, told the Globe that even though people may want a plastic water bottle ban to work, implementing it without a solid plan is a surefire way to ensure that it doesn’t.

Richmond and Gilman are also sponsoring a separate warrant that would require restaurants to have tap water available. The idea was unanimously shot down — although it’s a good plan, the Board said, there’s no clear plan to form it into a law.

It’s honorable, of course, that a city would try to ban something that’s making a serious strain on the environment. And it’s not a surprise that it’s Brookline, as they’ve always been leading the way in being green. This would be a good, logical next step, in theory.

However, in practice, maybe not so much. How do you go about making sure there are water stations wherever there was previously a vending machine? It’s difficult to tell how easy or difficult that would be, and there’s no telling the financial strain it would have on the city. College kids carry Nalgenes everywhere we go, but that’s because we know that there are water refill stations in most, if not all buildings on campus. It works for us, but will it work for everyone?

It raises the question of whether or not we actually care about the environment, or if we just care to the point that it’s going to inconvenience us. It will cost more money, put more strain on facilities and make it harder to just find some water when you’re thirsty.

If Brookline can make this work without putting extra strain on the city, that would be great. It’s just a matter of “if,” and it’s a big “if.” But honestly, if Brookline residents just wanted to drink their water out of a plastic bottle, they could just walk across the street into Boston.