In a previous post I touched on the glaring hypocrisy behind the Town of Aurora’s move to ban recyclable plastic water bottles while doing nothing about non recyclable single use coffee cups.
The Town of Aurora has removed bottled water from meetings in their facilities claiming on their website they are “dedicated to promoting municipal tap water as a healthy and accessible alternative to purchasing bottled drinks.”
This is bullshit.
The act of banning bottled bottles means that tap water isn’t “an alternative”, it is the only option for buying water when onsite at the Town of Aurora, which presents a whole bunch of issues that we will now explore together.
1.) If you don’t carry around a water bottle with you 24/7 you can no longer choose water as a healthy option in Town meetings and facilities. This is absurd.
It is not always possible to carry around a water bottle, especially in work situations or in environments where there are no food or drink notices, or around electronics. I do however always carry change with me, and will seek out and buy refrigerated bottled water.
Now the Town of Aurora has removed the accessible alternative to drinking municipal water from a publicly shared faucet.
Shame on them.
2.) It doesn’t matter how healthy municipal water is (and this is debatable seeing as 80% of Aurora’s water is sourced from lake Ontario and processed heavily through a treatment center resulting in a high chlorination taste) the issue is that it has to come out of a spout that is used by countless others in a public space. This is not a hygienic option by any stretch of the imagination.
Don’t believe me, go to one of the rec centers and watch what the kids do to water fountains and you too will never want to use one again.
If I want water I will buy it packaged into a bottle at the source where I can trust it has been handled in sterile and sanitary conditions.
3.) If there is an issue with recyclable “plastic bottles” why are they banned and not replaced with tetra-packed water?
Flow is an Aurora based company that produces 240,000 terta packs a day.
Their product is available locally at Superstore, Sobey’s, Metro and Nature’s Emporium, among other locations. Surely the town could work out a contract to have some delivered.
Instead there is a huge missed opportunity here to support a local business.
4.) If the town is dedicated to promoting municipal tap water as a healthy and accessible alternative to purchasing bottled drinks then why is bottled water and other sugary drinks carted into town parks?
Another fine example of mayor La De Dawe’s #provenhypocricy
5.) If plastic water bottles are recyclable, and the issue is them not being returned for recycle then why ban them instead of offering an incentive to increase the return rate?
Creating deposit systems for refundable bottles has been successful at diverting recyclable products into recycling systems. In Vancouver, the one day Coffee Cup Revolution organized by The Binners Project, gave a 5 cent refund for single-use coffee cups, 55,000 cups were collected in downtown Vancouver.
Provincially there are 2 regulations ( Ontario Regulation 101/94 and Ontario Regulation 13/07 ) that could be leveraged here, but as this facebook commentor pointed out Ballard failed to do anything, and I expect the same from the buck-o-beer OPC government:
That doesn’t mean the town of Aurora can’t or shouldn’t work on such an initiative.
In fact the town already considered doing so back in the early 70s according to the Newmarket Era:
47 years later and instead of introducing bottle and cup deposits and returns the town has decided to ban a recyclable container while allowing a non-recyclable one.
All thanks to selfie taking politicians who believe they are #gettingthingsdone.
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