Bottled water is bad for our planet all around. From the petroleum-based bottle production to the tens of billions of bottles that end up in landfills every year, the environmental impacts are devastating.
That is one of the reasons that activists like you have joined the Think Outside the Bottle campaign. You’ve helped build a movement: with your support, dozens of national parks have decided to buck the bottle, and dozens more could soon follow. Every park that drops bottled water stops tons of plastic from entering the waste stream: Zion National Park alone removed around 5,000 pounds of trash from its waste stream annually by going bottled water free.
But with every park that goes bottled water free, corporations like Nestlé can see their worst nightmares coming true: millions of park-goers educated about the harms of bottled water, drinking tap from reusable bottles. These corporations are determined to stop the bottled-water-free park movement in its tracks, so they’ve turned to interfering in Congress.
The International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) — the bottled water industry’s trade association and a mouthpiece for Nestlé in Congress — has once again prodded lawmakers to introduce language into the House Interior and Environment Appropriations bill that would make it illegal for parks to spend their funding to go bottled-water-free, outrageously protecting the profits of the bottled water industry at the expense of our parks and the environment.
We’ve seen this over and over again. Last summer IBWA lobbied members of Congress to introduce similar language into the appropriations bill. But nearly half a million people like you took action to make sure our elected officials stood up for our beautiful national parks, and together we stopped the amendment.
But IBWA is at it again. The trade association paid tens of thousands of dollars to members of Congress this year. And — surprise, surprise — the policy they favor now appears right in this year’s House appropriations bill, which if passed would forbid parks from using their funding to go bottled water free.
But it’s not over yet: the final spending deal has yet to be negotiated, and we still have time to make sure bottled-water-free policies are protected. We’ve stopped IBWA before, and we can stop IBWA again with you by our side. Stand up for our national parks and the environment.
