The City of Montreal wants to ban plastic water bottles because they hate water … or something … and want to save the world.
The University of Vermont banned selling water bottles in 2013 after a student-led campaign to reduce waste on campus. Seems like a good idea, right?
Two years after the bottle ban went into effect, the results are in, and they are … not great.
NPR reports that a study by UVM professor Rachel Johnson found that banning bottled water actually made the total number of bottles on campus increase. “When we compared the spring of 2012 to the spring of 2013,” Johnson told Vermont Public Radio’s Tyler Dobbs, “the number of bottles shipped per capita or per person to the UVM campus actually went up by 6 percent.”
That’s right — less access to bottled water meant more bottles wasted. The university replaced bottled water with filtered water stations, but apparently students skipped right past those and went for other bottled drinks like sodas and juices instead. Turns out, it’s not so easy to get college students to make the healthiest choices, especially when you forgot your Nalgene at home and the vending machine is right there.
So we took away the healthiest beverage.
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