Concord`s Ban of Single-Use Plastic Water Bottles
Baku, September 25 (AZERTAC). 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.
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