http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/the-national-park-service-just-ended-its-bottled-water-ban-after-finding-it-worked/
[Sad face. links in on-line article]
The National Park Service Just Ended Its Bottled Water Ban—After Finding
It Worked
Water bottlers spent lots of money to make this happen.
Joanna Nix
Sep. 26, 2017 5:48 PM
Update, September 27, 2017: In a statement released Tuesday, the
International Bottled Water Association rejected the findings of the
National Park Service’s May report. IBWA spokeswoman Jill Culora
asserted that the report in question wasn’t released publicly because,
as the FOIA response states, the NPS “lacked the data necessary to
ensure the report’s findings.” The IBWA claims that it learned, after a
FOIA request of its own, that the parks that participated in the program
didn’t collect recycling data based on type of material, and thus
couldn’t verify the report’s findings.
===============================
Last month, the National Park Service terminated a six-year program that
aimed to end the sale of disposable plastic water bottles in national
parks. The top bottled water lobby cheered; environmental groups booed.
And on Friday, per the Washington Post, we learned that the NPS’s action
ran seriously counter to what it had concluded just a few months
earlier: that its ban had worked.
In 2011, the NPS started allowing parks to voluntarily phase out the
sale of disposable plastic water bottles and install water fountains
instead. As of this year, 23 out of 417 parks were in the
program—including Mount Rushmore, Bryce Canyon, Zion, and Grand Canyon.
In a report completed in May, the NPS found that the ban had prevented
the use of between 1.3 and 2 million bottles—or between 73,000 and
112,000 pounds of plastic—per year in the participating parks. That’s as
if up to 12,000 Americans stopped using disposable plastic water bottles
for a year.
The report wasn’t made public until the end of the day on Friday, after
a Freedom of Information Act request called for its release. The NPS is
overseen by Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has
plans for our national monuments as well.
In a press release on its termination of the bottle ban program, the NPS
asserted that “the ban removed the healthiest beverage choice at a
variety of parks while still allowing sales of bottled sweetened
drinks,” an argument repeatedly raised by the International Bottled
Water Association, a lobbying group. (The IBWA spent nearly five times
more on lobbying last year than it did before the ban program was
enacted). That assertion by the NPS contradicts its earlier report,
which said that parks that wanted to participate in the program had to
complete an analysis to ensure that park employees and visitors would
have adequate alternative safe drinking water sources, and install
“conveniently located” water fountains.
You can read the NPS’s full report here.
[https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/foia/upload/Disposable-Plastic-Water-Bottle-Evaluation-Report_5_11_17.pdf]
