I was casually speaking with another student a couple of days ago when the topic about trying to get students to stop buying bottled water came up. She responded, “It’s their choice.” This struck me as funny, because in most cases that’s true, it is their choice. In a country where freedom is at the top of the list for reasons to be a citizen, it would seem almost treasonous to suggest that someone doesn’t have the option of choice or the freedom to do something. However in this case, the action of someone purchasing and using a bottle of water does not just affect that individual, it affects the entire biosphere, and I being a part of this biosphere would thus be affected as well. It may be hard to see the connection because it is not a simple one-to-one correlation of someone buying bottled water, and my quality of life being reduced. But when 100 million people purchase bottles of water, there is an accumulated effect, not just on the industry (we vote with our dollars) but on the environment and therefore on our fellow man as well.

Essentially, when you purchase a bottle of water you are endorsing the commodification of a basic human right, the right to drink water. When you make something as essential as water a commodity, you open it up to the same abuses that all other items of commercial importance are subject to. For instance, it may be mismanaged (as most resources are when they are left in the hands of corporations that are only interested in the bottom line), resulting in its depletion and potential extermination. Yes, we can run out of drinking water. Aside from all the problems that come with taking water from one part of the world and selling it at another, there is the issue of its packaging: It takes oil to make a plastic bottle, and in that refined plastic product are many different chemicals that have never been truly tested on humans; of course they are being tested on us right now. And in a country where as little as 8 percent of plastics are ever recycled, most of them end up in landfills where the plastics leach into the ground and poison us slowly. If they don’t end up in landfills then these plastics end up in the ocean where they are eaten by fish, which are eaten by us. Or they are eaten by cattle which are then consumed by us.

So I don’t have to go on for 10 pages describing the chemical trail of plastics in our environment and our bodies, here’s the skinny: you purchase a bottle of water, the chemicals and pollutants emitted from the factory that made the plastic decrease our quality of life. The chemicals and pollutants derived from the bottle itself as it degrades in the ocean or in the ground also decrease our quality of life, either by slowly poisoning us with endocrine disrupters, false estrogens and other poisons, or by decreasing our lifespans by increasing the risk of cancer. Even if not all of these effects are supported by science (and they are, just Google it), why would anyone want to be subject to countless different synthetic chemicals against their will? Many of these chemicals have never even been tested on animals!

In the end this isn’t about saying that all people who use bottled water are bad, it’s about warning those individuals that their actions affect not just the earth but themselves! If BPA from plastics, dioxins from the burning and melting down of those plastics, and excess CO2 in the atmosphere is affecting plants and animals, it is also affects humans – that means you and me! And so, you ask, in what way does it affect us? And I respond, sadly, I don’t know. As of yet no one knows because we are the guinea pigs this time, we are the lab rats being tested for BPA, dioxins and countless other synthetic chemicals. Only time will tell of their effects. However, we can choose to say no to being lab rats for the plastic industries. Please, think before you drink.