Eagles Love Tap Water!!!

At Florida Gulf Coast University it is strongly encouraged to drink tap water instead of bottled water. This launched the Eagles Love Tap Water campaign. There are many reasons for this group to promote drinking tap water. First of all tap water is much cheaper than bottled water and free for students. Tap water is also regularly checked for E. Coli and fecal coliform bacteria while bottled water isn’t. Tap water is also tested for coliform bacteria more than 100 times a month, unlike bottled water, which is tested once a week. The water in the plastic bottles is actually tap water 25% of the time, so you’re actually spending a large amount of money on tap water.

Bottled water is also a danger to our environment. The water bottles account for one and a half million tons of plastic waste each year, and this plastic waste is placed in landfills. In fact approximately 90% of the waters bottles used by Americans every year are not recycled thus being placed landfills. Add to this that it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bottle to biodegrade and a serious issue for our environment has been caused by our carelessness.

*Photos From Cafepress*

The group responsible for the Eagles Love Tap Water campaign, eagles4earth, is now also distributing 2000 reusable aluminum bottles to combat our growing environmental issue. The cost of this procedure is $8,280 but will save students so much more since almost every type of plastic water bottle purchased costs $1.25. You can fill the water bottles up at the newly installed spigots on the water fountains. Eagles4earth group also provides other alternate solutions that can be used like using water filters for your water.

The eagles4earth group has also distributed pamphlets to students to raise awareness of the harms of plastic bottles. The pamphlet contains information that indicates the harms and cost of plastic bottles like that it takes 1,000 years for a water bottle to biodegrade, that tap water costs $.002 per gallon and bottled water ranges from $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon, that it takes 17 million gallons of oil each year to create the 1.5 million tons of plastic used to make bottled water, and that the amount of waste created by the plastic bottles have contributed to make an island of trash estimated to be roughly twice the size of Texas, called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

When I was walking to class one day I got a pamphlet handed to me with information like this. I read the pamphlet, understood the dangers, and have tried to use bottled water as little as possible. In fact, I now refill water bottles with tap water, place them in my refrigerator, and drink them when they are cold. This has proven to be a good enough substitute to bottled water, and I most likely would not have thought about doing this had it not been for the pamphlet handed to me.