Leave it to Massachusetts: trailblazers in gay marriage and just all-around good old-fashioned community-minded liberal folks. Mitt Romney notwithstanding, can the world really be surprised that the adorable Massachusetts town of Concord is the first city in the country to ban single-use water bottles? (Some college campuses have enacted bans already, but not even so many of those.)
The ban comes as the result of a three-year fight from local activists, who are quite understandably appalled that Americans use 1,500 bottles every second. A small percentage of these are recycled to make things like jeans and birdhouses, but mostly, they just get thrown out. Which sucks.
So the deal is that in Concord, Mass., 19 miles from Boston, population 17,688 (thanks Wikipedia!), you can no longer sell single-use bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate and filled with non-flavored, non-sparkling liquid (i.e. water). If you do sell an item of this ilk, first you get a warning, then you get a fine. There is an exception for emergencies, but we expect that “oh I didn’t think to get any water out of a fucking tap and put it in any one of the kajillions of containers I have in my house and now I’m thirsty” does not constitute an emergency.
