Students say no to bottled water
CCSS anti-bottle campaigners, photo by Alan Piffer.
A group of concerned Camosun students will be spreading the word on March 11 about their intentions to rid the sale of bottled water from campuses across Canada.
Bottled Water Free Day is a nationwide initiative in which the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) will be mobilizing to campaign for the ban of bottled water sales on Canadian college and university campuses.
At Camosun, the Camosun Students for Environmental Awareness (CSEA) will be leading the charge with an information booth, petitions, and sales of refillable, environmentally friendly water bottles.
According to CSEA, there are numerous reasons to push for the ban of the ubiquitous plastic water bottles, one of them being the health concerns relating to chemicals in the plastic.
“You could have water that was put into a bottle and it sits for maybe five months before it gets into your hand for you to drink,” says Roxanne Smillie, CSEA member and Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) Lansdowne executive.
“And, in that time, it could go through a heating and cooling process, and in those processes chemicals are then leached into your water from the bottles,” says Smillie. “And not only from the bottles, but also outside the bottles; different things can leach into your water. In the time where it gets removed from aquifers or different areas to the time it gets into your mouth, you can have many different things come into your system.”
Smillie says it’s important for students to recognize they don’t have to pay extra money for water, and to avoid taking part in the draining of natural water systems, as well as the creation of so many plastic bottles.
“It’s a fundamental issue here that we have in our society—paying for water that we already pay for to get filtered, and putting it into a plastic bottle,” says Smillie. “It’s our own local water that’s being shipped to us. So it’s not only the health issue that we have around it, it’s the plastic bottles and how unsustainable we find them to be.”
And fellow CSEA member and CCSS board member Jordan Sandwith adds that consumers may not be aware the water in plastic bottles isn’t held to the same standards as our own municipal tap water.
“They’re buying the grand illusion that it’s better, cleaner, and healthier water,” says Sandwith. “But, in fact, that may not always be the case.”
Beyond health and environmental issues, CSEA wants to spread the word about the dangers of water becoming more and more of a tradable commodity, and, to that effect, will be screening a documentary examining the issues around the privatization of water, during their on-campus campaign on March 11.
“You have investors saying, ‘This is the next big thing to invest in,’” says CSEA member Karl Martinson. “We’re saying water’s a basic human right. You don’t have a right to go to our rivers, pull it out, and then sell it back to us, and say, ‘Well that’s just the way the market works, and so it should happen.’”
While the CSEA admits it will be difficult to convince the college to abandon the revenue source bottled-water sales rake in, they do say that students have the choice to avoid purchasing it.
“One of the cleanest sources of water on campus is just only steps past the cashier at the Lansdowne cafeteria,” says Sandwith. “There’s a water refilling station which has been filtered by the college. If more students were aware that right after paying for their water, they could get even cleaner water for free, they would be astounded by the irony.”
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