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Carrot & Stick: January 2010

Carrot To

Bundanoon, Australia, for becoming the first town Down Under to ban the sale of bottled water. This past July, 356 residents filed into the most attended town meeting in Bundanoon history and voted overwhelmingly to back the ban, known as Bundy on Tap, or BOT. The initiative, which garnered just one nay, is a clear win for the planet. It will help reduce not just the amount of plastic accumulating in landfills, but also the more than 456,000 barrels of oil required to produce, package, transport, and refrigerate the nearly 600 million liters of bottled water Aussies consume each year—not to mention the 60,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere in the process.

BOT sprang up following an outcry over Sydney-based beverage company Norlex's intention to build a water extraction plant in town. When Bundanoon residents nixed that plan, Norlex plotted to extract local water and truck it out of town for bottling. BOT mastermind Huw Kingston, owner of two Bundanoon-based businesses, penned a call for action in the local quarterly—which he summarizes by saying, "if we as a community were against having a water extraction plant in town, then perhaps we should look at not having the end product in town." This past September, instead of stocking Norlex's and its competitors' bottled H2O, Bundanoon stores cleared their coolers and began selling reusable bottles. The town has also installed four filtered-water drinking fountains with spouts that allow for easy refilling.

Stick To

Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, aka F.O.R.C.E., for its Eyes for Frosty story and coloring book that sells the next generation on the virtues of coal. The story opens as three young children put the finishing touches on a snowman and innocently ask where they can find coal for the eyes. Enter Power Rock and his sidekick, Spurt, who tell the children how coal is made, harvested, and used—without so much as a mention that burning coal is a leading cause of global warming, acid rain, and smog.

That's quite a bit of propaganda for a group whose self-professed goal is "to provide accurate and balanced information to Pennsylvania citizens about the contributions and benefits of a healthy coal industry." For balance, F.O.R.C.E. might have added that in an average year, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a coal plant generates 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide, which forms lung inflammation-triggering smog. Or they could have illustrated what the Environmental Protection Agency estimates are 1.5 million fish trapped against structures that annually draw 2.2 billion gallons of water up from lakes, rivers, and oceans to turn the turbines at a typical coal-fired power plant.

--Rachel Dowd

JANUARY 2010 p. 22

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