Silverthorne council drops the water bottle

SILVERTHORNE, Colorado — Silverthorne town council members found pitchers of iced tap water on the table at their regular work session last week, rather than individual containers of bottled water.

With that seemingly minor move, Silverthorne has joined a growing movement of U.S. municipalities taking steps to eliminate water bottles that clog landfills, litter highway shoulders and bob in waterways for years like jellyfish.

From now on, Silverthorne will discourage use of bottled water in all town departments, Town Manager Kevin Batchelder said.

“It’s an environmental issue,” he said. “It’s an easy thing to do, and I believe it’s important.”

Some major cities ‹ such as San Francisco and Seattle ‹ have gone as far as prohibiting any use of public funds to buy bottled water. Last summer, New York City stopped short of an official ban but launched an advertising campaign encouraging the use of tap water instead.

While many factors contribute to the rise in bottled-water consumption, Silverthorne’s public works director Bill Linfield challenges the suggestion that bottled water is safer than town water.

“We have the good fortune to be the first ones to use (the water), because we’re at the top” as a headwaters community, he said.

Silverthorne’s municipal water supply comes from town wells, which, like much of Summit County, are located near the highest point in the continental watershed.

“Most other municipalities use stream water that’s downstream from someone else’s wastewater plant,” Linfield added.

And much of the bottled water on the grocer’s shelf in Summit County is just that — some other city’s municipal water.

The Aquafina brand bottled water sold locally, for example, is merely Denver city water run through an additional seven filtering steps before being bottled and sent to the High Country, a PepsiCo spokesperson said.

Coca Cola’s most popular water brand — Dasani — is also repackaged municipal drinking water.

High Country Conservation Center director Carly Wier applauded Silverthorne’s decision.

“Bottled water is absolutely one of the most wasteful things in modern history,” she said. “The bottles take a lot of energy to ship, and once they get into consumers’ hands, most end up in the trash.”

Every hour, Americans throw away about 2.5 million plastic bottles, she added. In 2007, the American bottled water industry used more than 17 million barrels of oil to produce its packaging, reported the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.

Criticism of bottled water has yet to make any obvious impact on the industry’s sales, however. The International Bottled Water Association projected continued expansion of revenues worldwide for 2008, with an increase of nearly 8 percent in the U.S. alone.