Green Mountain College students care so much about the environment and freedom of choice they have forced a ban on bottled water on the Poultney campus.
"The more we buy and sell bottled water, the more we engage in a culture of treating water as a commodity, incentivizing businesses to extract it from the ground in one community and selling it elsewhere, with little benefit to the people or ecosystem in the community from which the water was extracted," says the College's sustainability coordinator Aaron Witham.
That's college understanding of economics in a nutshell. Pick any product and this exact same claim can be made. If you donate to an environmental cause, for example, they are paying lobbyists who are buying things for politicians, and paper is getting made to print fundraising brochures - treating trees as a commodity - and most of that paper goes into a landfill.
Because everything goes into a landfill, even if it says it is recyclable. Once government took over the recycling business the backlog became 20 years - and the biggest recycler for America's largest state, California, is China. Shipping recycled material to China using fossil fuels where it sits in a landfill for decades is not better for anyone.
But a bottled water ban is 'making a difference' the way homeopathy makes a difference - for people who believe in it. It sets these students on the right path to being progressive social authoritarians, though. 25% of students signed a petition and that was enough to mandate behavior for everyone. The contractor agreed to stop selling bottled water in the dining hall and they got PepsiCo to remove bottled water from all of its soda machines on campus and replace it with tea and seltzer water - in bottles.
The college also claims to be carbon neutral - by buying carbon offsets which, like shipping your recycling to China, looks like it is making a difference but is just a feel-good fallacy. Or their spending $6 million on a biomass facility - that burns wood. Where did that $6 million come from? The Commodification Of Students, using their economic hypothesis on water.
In blind taste tests, people can't tell the difference between bottled water and most tap water. I cannot figure out why anyone buys it, the same way I can't figure out why people pay so much for organic food. But bottled water and organic food shouldn't be banned just because they are intellectual placebos.
Water bottle image: Penn State
