Concord's Ban of Single-Use Plastic Water Bottles Is a Go

Water bottle photo via Shutterstock

So begins a great experiment to rid the Commonwealth of plastic water bottles. The Attorney General recently certified Concord's bottle ban, which means—barring any citizen-brought effort to overturn it, or meddling from the plastics industry—starting January 1, there will be no plastic water bottles smaller than 1 liter for sale within the town borders.

Let's suppose for a second the plastics industry does not bring its weight to bear on this, that the citizens don't get balky, and that the ban actually comes to pass. Well folks, this will obviously signal the end of freedom and the rise of the Concord Liberal as a new subspecies of political animal. Because if freedom isn't the ability to throw a plastic water bottle away a few minutes after using it, then, well, I don't know what freedom is.

But let's examine this for a second. It appears to be a case of a poor giant corporation's rights to sell an already free and plentiful product to people at an incredible markup, versus the people who don't want to live in (or pass off) a world that's piled high in trash.

By definition, thirst is temporary (unless you're thirsty for a few days, then you die), and plastic water bottles last hundreds of years (at least). So by buying a regular old bottle of water, you're paying for a few minutes of relief and then a perpetual storage fee to keep the bottle in a landfill. But think of the value. If the bottle costs a dollar (because water is free) and we keep it stored for 450 years, that's just two cents per decade. (Note: This estimate does not include the costs of waste hauling, landfill construction and maintenance, or any of those so-called environmental costs)

If freedom isn't the ability to be as shortsighted as is possible, then, again, I don't know what is. So let's all go buy some plastic bottles before the inevitable hippie liberal environmentalist elite agenda takes away our freedom.