Ban the Bottle, Try the Tap! 2010
Towne Meadow Elementary School Brownie Troop 88
Towne Meadow Brownie Troop 88 members show off the reusable water bottles provided to students for their Ban the Bottle, Try the Tap! campaign. They estimated that 112 plastic disposable water bottles are consumed and thrown away each day at their school.
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During Earth Week the Brownies at Towne Meadow Elementary School engaged students with an educational campaign demonstrating the amount of energy consumed and waste produced by buying and using disposable water bottles. They hope to encourage students to only use disposable water bottles when other options are not available.
Here are just a few of their Earth Week activities:
Did you know?
Do the Math: In 2006, Americans consumed 31 billion liters of bottled water, or 62 billion half-liter bottles. Assuming each bottle is about 20 cm high, five water bottles would measure a meter, and 62 billion bottles make 12.4 billion meters or 12.4 million km. The moon is about 384,399 km away from Earth on average. Therefore, stacked end-to-end, the water bottles used by Americans in 2006 would stretch to the moon and back over 16 times.
Here are just a few of their Earth Week activities:
- Completed bulletin board depicting “5 Reasons Not to Drink Bottled Water”
- Explained project and its purpose during morning announcements
- Completed display board for use in cafeteria that showed the impact just one student can have by bringing a reusable bottle from home
- Built two displays out of 112 discarded water bottles each from the cafeteria to help students visualize the number of bottles per day consumed in their school lunch room
- Hung “Ban the bottle, Try the tap!” posters above school water fountains
- Showed ABC News segment, “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” to entire school
- Provided the same information to the parents through the Friday Flyers
Did you know?
- Bottled water costs about 500-5,000 times more than tap water
- 40% of bottled water is tap water
- Bottled water is not cleaner or healthier than tap water, and its quality is regulated less
- 86% of plastic water bottles used in the U.S. are not recycled and end up in landfills
- The total estimated energy needed to make, transport, and dispose of one bottle of water is equivalent to filling the same bottle one-quarter full of oil
Do the Math: In 2006, Americans consumed 31 billion liters of bottled water, or 62 billion half-liter bottles. Assuming each bottle is about 20 cm high, five water bottles would measure a meter, and 62 billion bottles make 12.4 billion meters or 12.4 million km. The moon is about 384,399 km away from Earth on average. Therefore, stacked end-to-end, the water bottles used by Americans in 2006 would stretch to the moon and back over 16 times.
The students brainstormed and created a bulletin board showing “Five Reasons not to Buy Bottled Water. They also distributed reusable stainless steel water bottles to students who promised to use and reuse the bottles over and over again.
Water isn’t like other products at the store that are made in factories or grown in farms; the only way to get water is to take it naturally from the earth. Evey human takes from the same world reservoir: the water cycle.
Yuck! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean is estimated to be an area about the size of Texas and full of plastic trash. If we stop using so many disposable plastics, this won’t grow much larger.
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This is one of the reasons they listed. Bottled water is not cleaner or healthier than tap water, and its quality is regulated less. Also, 40% of all bottled water is tap water!
Bottled water is expensive. It is expensive to make, to transport, to buy, and to dispose of the bottles. Why go through this expense when tap water is so good?
Signs were placed near water fountains at Towne Meadow Elementary to remind students that it is easy to stay hydrated without purchasing wasteful plastic disposable water bottles.
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Towne Meadow Elementary students purchase an average of 112 disposable water bottles daily. Brownie troop 88 built a tower out of one day’s water bottles to illustrate to the students how much waste is being produced there each day.