Americans are likely to be exposed at higher levels than previously thought to bisphenol A, a compound that mimics hormones important to human development and is found in more than 90 percent of people in the United States, according to new research.

U.S. EPA says it is OK for humans to take in up to 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight each day. The new study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, suggests that we are exposed to at least eight times that amount every day.

“Our data raise grave concern that regulatory agencies have grossly underestimated current human exposure levels,” states the study.

The study also gives the first experimental support that some BPA is likely cleared at similar rates in mice, monkeys and humans, making it possible to extrapolate health studies in mice to humans.

Despite decades of research, questions about BPA have lingered and recently become politicized. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) hopes to add an amendment to the “FDA Food Safety Modernization Act,” currently under consideration in the Senate, banning the chemical from children’s food and drink packaging. Republicans and industry representatives have been averse, saying that research has not shown conclusively that the chemical is harmful.

Hormones are essential during development and can determine, among other things, a child’s gender. BPA, since it mimics estrogen, is an “endocrine disrupter,” according to Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And amazingly, BPA has the ability to bind to not one, but three receptors — the estrogen, the male hormone and the thyroid hormone receptors, Zoeller said.

Controversy over method

Some scientists question whether the ability of BPA to bind receptors translates to a health effect. Detractors say that most of the chemical does not circulate in blood long enough to have health effects. All scientists agree that BPA resembles estrogen, and indeed, it was first synthesized as a man-made estrogen substitute before being used widely in the linings of canned goods and polycarbonate plastics.

Within the scientific world, the controversy hinges on the seemingly obscure question: Does the liver detox the chemical completely enough to secrete most of it out in urine, or does BPA get into human blood where it can mimic important hormones?

Feeding human volunteers a fixed dose of BPA and sampling their blood to check for the chemical would answer some of these questions, according to Zoeller. But such an experiment throws up ethical issues. The only human study of this nature was conducted in 2002 by the German researcher Wolfgang Völkel at the University of Würzburg.

Völkel found the liver removes more than 99 percent of BPA from the blood, and humans excrete it within six hours. He did find some BPA in the blood of his volunteers but found this level to be insignificant.

It is at this point that science breaks down into controversy. Some researchers say the method Völkel used to measure BPA in the blood was not sensitive enough and that he likely overestimated the ability of the chemical to pass through without causing harm.

The new study, led by Julia Taylor, a biologist at the University of Missouri, uses a more sensitive test for measuring the compound. She fed mice and monkeys a fixed amount of BPA daily. She took blood samples and found that the animals had “biologically active” amounts of the estrogen-like chemical, according to the study.

The study suggests that BPA is not completely removed by the liver and does circulate in the blood and in amounts that are cause for concern, according to Taylor.

“For those of us who work with BPA, no one has actually directly compared mice and monkeys before, and monkeys and humans before,” Taylor said. “For those of us who work with it in an academic sense at least, this is confirmation of what we believe.”

This study suggests that all the possible ways in which humans are exposed to BPA are not yet known, Taylor said. It also makes it possible to compare studies of BPA in mice and extrapolate it to monkeys and humans since they all clear BPA at similar rates, she said.

“These data should make us reconsider some previously held hypotheses about BPA, such as how quickly it is cleared from the body and the differences in metabolism between species,” said Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “The paper emphasizes the need to better understand all the potential sources of human exposure.”

Feedback

While some scientists found Taylor’s method elegant, others such as industry-associated scientists Julie Goodman and Lorenz Rhomberg, both principals at Gradient, were not convinced. Rhomberg pointed out that Taylor had not measured blood samples in humans herself.

He also said the human blood values that she used come from studies where the samples were contaminated.

Taylor countered that she did not feel it ethically correct to conduct experiments on humans, and Völkel had in fact removed any background noise due to contamination from his results.

Gary Ginsberg, professor at the University of Connecticut and the Yale School of Medicine, said that the study was a good first step that addressed some of the controversy surrounding BPA degradation.

“It is a good exposition of data in primates that shows pharmacokinetics in administered and controlled situations,” Ginsberg said. He said that more studies and an even more refined method of measuring BPA in blood would be better.

Zoeller at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said that this study provides some evidence that the liver allows some BPA to get into blood and that our exposure to the chemical is greater than previously thought.

“The body evolved to handle stuff that gets into our system — the liver is designed to detoxify,” he said. “There are a range of molecules that are natural, and some are incredible toxins. But when we start to make molecules that are not known to nature, we need to think a little more carefully about how they are going to interact with biological systems.”

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

Despite a mixed environmental record even before the Gulf of Mexico disaster, state officials included BP on the technical team for its soon-to-be-completed environmental education curriculum, which will be used in kindergarten through 12th-grade classes in more than 1,000 school districts statewide.

Environmental watchdogs and some experts who worked on the project said BP’s involvement is troubling given its handling of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, which killed 11 workers and dumped more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/09/07/3009448/bp-aids-statesschool-content.html#ixzz0yz7XkQiX

Christopher Gannon/Register photos

In this picture you’ll see the corn is planted to the very edge of the rive basin. As water flows downstream it begins to wash away the land as you can see here:

A responsible farmer would plant a patch of grass between his crops and the stream or river’s edge as a buffer to keep the pesticides, fertilizers and sediment from running into the stream. But despite reports to the contrary – many farmers aren’t being the good stewards to the land we’d like them to be. And honestly why would they be? Our federal government pays them more to plant crops than to conserve land. Last year the federal government paid $129 Billion more for farmers to plant crops than to conserve land. So in this case you can’t really hate the player – you have to hate the game.

The most annoying part of the whole situation is that since 1985 there has been a law on the books that requires farmers to plants grassy areas near river basins to prevent their pesticides and fertilizers from running into the water…initially the farmers complied and water pollution rates dropped dramatically. But since 1995 the USDA has stopped enforcing this law and now we have one of the largest dead zones in the Gulf that’s ever been recorded.

Tell the government to do it’s job! Contact your Senator or Congressman and tell them to enforce the law!!

An excerpt from the New Yorker expose on Koch:

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?printable=true#ixzz0yEWuGCBL

His frayed shirt pocket is stuffed so full of notes that it’s ripping at the seams. Hairy eyebrows spring off his face like grasshopper antennae. There’s a purple prairie clover stuck in the dash of his van, a bird book below the radio.

He says bizarre, eco-minded things like “I want to be a chloroplast.”

So maybe it should come as no surprise that this wild-haired, icy-eyed farmer in southwest Minnesota is among the first people at this latitude to make an important intellectual leap:

He sees people who live and work near the Gulf of Mexico as his neighbors — even though they’re 1,200 miles away.

Further, he’s changing the way he farms in order to protect them.

Scientists have recorded one of the largest “dead zones” in the Gulf’s history this year. This oxygen-sapped area — currently about the size of New Jersey — is caused in large part by fertilizer that funnels into the ocean from Midwestern farms, since more than 40 percent of the land in the United States drains into the Gulf.

The fertilizer kicks off a chain reaction of biological processes that, in the end, drains the water of oxygen and kills fish, shrimp and other marine creatures that can’t swim away.

This year, the BP oil spill may make matters worse. The coast is already strapped for cash, and some scientists fear cumulative effects of the environmental stress.

Thompson, 54, whose family built a house on this farmland in 1878, doesn’t want to contribute to any of this.

“I’d much rather eat wild Gulf shrimp than farmed shrimp, and I know that my efforts may seem insignificant, but I think we can have sustainable fishing in the Gulf and corn production in the Mississippi [River] watershed,” he said.

“I think we should all be saying, ‘We must have both.’ ”

But, as he well knows, cleaning up the Gulf from the Midwest will require continental changes.

Suicidal shrimp

As summer approaches and the Louisiana air gets hot and wet, Dean Blanchard says, he can tell that the dead zone is forming because shrimp leap onto the beach.

“They pretty much commit suicide,” he says.

Blanchard, who owns a large-scale seafood wholesaling business in Grand Isle, Louisiana, says he never saw that phenomenon until six or seven years ago.

Scientists first recorded an oxygen-dead zone in the Gulf in 1972. Since then, the size of this underwater coffin has fluctuated, but it is growing. In 2009, the dead zone smothered an area of about 3,000 square miles. This year, it is more than twice as big — and is the fifth largest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors the area.

The longer the phenomenon persists, the weaker the Gulf ecosystem becomes, said Rob Magnien, director of the Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research at NOAA.

“If the area grows large enough, the consequence is, at some point, we’ll reach a tipping point where some of our major commercial and recreational species [of fish, shrimp and oysters] would be severely affected,” he said.

No one knows for sure when the Gulf will cross that threshold, but the wait may not be long, Magnien said. Early testing indicates that the ocean ecosystem is already under intense stress: It takes less fertilizer pollution today, for example, to produce a large dead zone in the Gulf than it did several years ago.

That’s a sign that the dead zone will continue to grow unless fertilizer levels are cut drastically.

In the meantime, people in the Gulf seafood industry, like Blanchard, say they have to work around the dead zone each summer. Blanchard says he loses up to $250,000 of his $35 million total revenue per year because of the phenomenon.

And shrimpers may not be able to avoid the zone forever.

“They avoid the dead zone areas and are able to catch shrimp in other areas, but at some point, the zone is going to grow to a size where they can’t reach the shrimp anymore or they simply have insufficient habitat to maintain a robust population,” Magnien said.

Blanchard says the Gulf has become “the cesspool of the nation” because “everything comes down to us.”

“If you s— in the river, then you s— down here,” he said. “They send us all the garbage; it comes down the river to us.”

Neighbors by water

Thompson, the Minnesota farmer, has never been to Louisiana.

And Blanchard, the Louisiana seafood businessman, has never been to Minnesota. “It’s too cold up there,” he said.

But their paths crossed last summer, when Thompson was organizing a community event at his 3,000-acre property, Willow Lake Farm.

He wanted his Minnesota neighbors to meet a person who was affected by their fertilizer use and water management.

“We’re all in this together,” he said.

He also wanted to eat some delicious Louisiana shrimp. So, out of the blue, he called Blanchard and invited him to visit.

Blanchard didn’t attend. But he did send his shrimp north for the event, and Thompson used that food as an entree into talk about the dead zone.

Blanchard is not angry at farmers in the Midwest, he said. But he is furious about the situation.

“I’m mad at the government, that they don’t make them use different kinds of [chemicals on their farms]. Somebody’s got to be smart enough in this country to invent something that can do the job they need up there — and not ruin the Gulf,” he said.

“The government ought to have a team of scientists working on that. How bad are they going to let it get before somebody stops it?”

The government has started to look for solutions but hasn’t made a notable dent in the problem.

The entire Mississippi River watershed must reduce its output of two key fertilizer pollutants — nitrogen and phosphorus — by 45 percent to get the dead zone down to a manageable size, says a 2008 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

If those cuts happened, the dead zone still would be nearly twice the size of Rhode Island.

A new way of farming

Thompson was driving a tractor across his parents’ farm in 1989 when he cracked.

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the deafening roar of the engine.

Mostly it was because he felt the way he was farming — tilling over the soil — was destroying the environment.

“I just hated it,” he said. “It seemed impossibly destructive.”

That night, he scratched this entry in his personal journal: “Never grow up to be a farmer.”

But time passed. And Thompson realized that it was just this method of farming that he hated. His intense frustration helped mold his view that the land, water and air are inextricably tied and that the actions of one farmer can be felt thousands of miles away.

He vowed to become a different kind of farmer.

With the help of an environmentally minded neighbor and his brother, Thompson etched out his vision on a large sheet of butcher paper, which he spread out on a kitchen table.

He didn’t want to till the land anymore, which he saw as a contributor to erosion and phosphorus runoff. He would apply “the softest touch on the land” possible, he said.

After struggling to explain this idea to bankers, Thompson finally got a loan to fund his vision. He put it into practice first on a small section of the family property, which he leased from his dad.

The changes worked. Yields went up. And, in Thompson’s view, the local environment became healthier, too. Missing critters like the meadow jumping mouse returned to the farm. The water became clearer. All of this eased his conscience.

He started to love the farm again.

“Here, I know all of my neighbors,” he said. “This is where I make my living. This is where my ancestors made their living. I’m not interested in fouling my nest.”

‘A long way away’

For many, fouling the Gulf’s nest is another story.

It’s relatively easy to convince farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices if they can see the effects nearby, said Gary Sands, an assistant professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering at the University of Minnesota, who teaches farmers about the environment.

But it’s hard to sell changes that deal with the Gulf’s dead zone.

“They agree there is a problem, but they’re just so separate — so far away — from what’s going on in the Gulf,” he said of the farmers.

Scientists largely have figured out what farmers need to do to lessen their impact on the dead zone, said David Mulla, a founding fellow and soil scientist at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

To be effective in tackling the Gulf’s problems, however, Mulla said, the new techniques have to be applied across the entire Midwest.

Right now, however, only voluntary pilot projects exist. And at best, with widespread adoption of these techniques, he said, the U.S. would reach its targets for shrinking the dead zone in 25 years.

Still, Mulla said, the efforts of one can make a difference.

He’s seen that happen before.

When the state started pushing farmers to leave some of their land wild along the banks of streams to act as a buffer, no one seemed interested in taking valuable land out of production.

Then one farmer broke.

“Eventually, we got one farmer who agreed to do it, and — [snap] — just like that, everyone followed.”

Farm filter

Walk to the bottom of a field of alfalfa on Thompson’s farm, and you can see the start of Mulla’s one-farmer theory in action.

The green field, bursting with purple flowers this time of year, slopes toward a small body of water called Fish Lake, where Thompson grew up swimming and where he can’t help but snorkel from time to time, he says.

He planted alfalfa here specifically to buffer that lake from nutrients. Alfalfa is a “very greedy plant,” he says, so it sucks up most of the water and fertilizer before it can get away.

But he’s going further than that.

Just before the field gives way to a thatch of oak trees and then the water, a small metal box is stuck in the ground.

It’s not much to look at, but that box — and another like it — is the visible component of an underground “bioreactor.” It eats nitrates out of the water before they hit the lake.

Water is piped through a subterranean block of woodchips that’s roughly the size of a blue whale. This slows the water down long enough for bacteria to start a process called nitrification, in which liquid nitrates from the fertilized water turn to harmless gas.

From there, the water trickles into Fish Lake and the Watonwan, Minnesota and Mississippi rivers before spilling into the salty Gulf.

On that journey, it slithers past Minneapolis, Minnesota; St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee; and finally New Orleans, Louisiana. You might think that, on such a long and winding journey, pollutants would somehow make their way out of the river, but scientists say that when liquid nitrates jump onto this one-way conveyor belt, they don’t look back until they’ve made it all the way to the ocean.

Thompson installed the woodchip bioreactor two years ago at a cost of $6,600, and most of that was paid through a university grant, he said. Another nitrogen-reduction project on a different field cost him $70,000. He paid that sum, he said, because that groundwater control system stands to increase his farm’s productivity, too.

Both of those systems are rather effective, Mulla said. The drainage system removes up to half of the ocean-harming nutrients; his bioreactor is capable of pulling 50 to 80 percent all of the nitrates out of the water under optimal conditions, said Sands, also from the University of Minnesota.

Thompson also says he monitors his fertilizer applications down “to the gnat’s eyelash” in order to reduce the amount of nitrate that enters the watershed.

“We don’t want to waste any nitrogen,” he said.

Thompson says it’s his responsibility to “send the best water possible downstream.” He doesn’t have the money to do everything he would like. But he’s optimistic about the situation improving in the long term.

“My job is to be a farmer, and I’m very committed to being the best farmer I can be,” he said. “I know to be a farmer I’m going to make a mess, and there are going to be mistakes, but my job is just to do a better job than I did last year.”

He hopes the idea spreads, one farmer at a time.

Food & Water Watch Analysis Reveals Uptick in Sourcing from Taxpayer-Supported Water Supplies

Washington, D.C.—New analysis of industry data released today by the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch finds that almost half of all bottled water sold in U.S. retail outlets in PET plastic bottles now comes from municipal tap water supplies. Bottling Our Cities’ Tap Water shows that between 2000 and 2009 the share of retail-sold PET bottled water that is actually tap water grew from 32.7 percent to 47.8 percent.

The data also reveals that the volume of tap water bottled in PET and sold in retail outlets increased almost twice as fast as that of spring water over the same period. In 2000, 449.3 million gallons of tap water were bottled, increasing 453 percent to 2.5 billion gallons in 2009. Over that same time, the volume of spring water bottled grew 194 percent from 922.8 million gallons to 2.7 billion gallons.

“These are the numbers the bottled water industry doesn’t want you to see,” said Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter. “These figures reveal that more and more bottled water is basically the same product the flows from consumer taps, subsidized by taxpayer dollars—then poured into an environmentally destructive package, and sold for thousands of times its actual value.”

The industry data attributes the increase in tap water in retail-sold PET bottled water to Nestle Pure Life’s switch from spring water to tap water in 2005. The company increased expenditures on advertising for Nestle Pure Life by 3,000 percent between 2004 and 2009, and sales of the brand were up by 18 percent in 2009.

While community resistance to spring water and ground water extraction has increased in recent years, many municipalities have brokered deals with bottled water companies to sell off water supplies allocated for future growth or times of drought in exchange for the promise of jobs or increased tax revenues. Separate analysis conducted by Food & Water Watch found that the typical bottled water plant employs only 24 people.

Bottling Our Cities’ Tap Water is available here.

Tapped has reported on the scandal that is bottled water: Companies suck up millions of gallons of public water, then they sell it back to us at a huge markup in plastic bottles that cause serious environmental problems.

A state bill sponsored by Felipe Fuentes (D-San Fernando) will soon get a floor vote to eliminate on part of the scandal: It would require water bottlers to report how much water they take from public aquifers. The governor vetoed the bill last year in a skirmish over the budget.

Also last summer, the City of Sacramento made a deal with Nestle that is stricter than most: It charges the company 65 cents per 100 cubic feet of water, instead of giving it up for free. But the city didn’t limit the Nestle’s total draw, even as local residents faced water restrictions. And the 65 cent price is 10 cents lowerthan the generic commercial rate, although Nestle will make a 10,000 percent profit on the water.

Fuentes’ bill wouldn’t undo sweetheart deals like this one, but it would force water bottlers like Nestle to report their water use to the state — which would empower officials to consider this significant source of commercial use in determining how best to handle California’s contentious water issues.

Ask your representatives to support the bill by signing this petition.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=70679#ixzz0xdRGexRp

Attention marketers: Within the next few weeks, you may be recasting your entire green-marketing strategy.

Right now on the desks of Federal Trade Commissioners is the new set of so-called Green Guides that are used by the FTC to guide enforcement of existing laws. They are the first environmental-marketing guidelines in 12 years and could radically reshape how far marketers can go in painting their products, packaging or even corporate images green.

Christopher Cole, an advertising-law specialist and partner with law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips in Washington, said the guides could render most of the more than 300 environmental seals of approval now in currency on packaging and products largely useless and possibly in violation of FTC standards. They could also influence efforts, seemingly stalled, by retailers such as Walmart to institute a sustainability-rating system for products.

The guides are expected to tighten standards for packaging claims such as “recyclable” or “biodegradable”; regulate how marketers use such terms as “carbon neutral”; and how quickly and close to the source of carbon output “carbon offsets” must be executed, among other things.

They may also attempt to define such legally and linguistically squishy terms as “sustainability” or tackle the central issue of many “greenwashing” controversies — trying to define how far companies can go in painting themselves as green in advertising when they or their products also have detrimental environmental impacts.

A spokesman for the FTC said the commission is on track to meet its schedule of issuing updated guidelines by the end of summer, and that they’re likely to cover areas that were the subject of FTC workshops over the past three years, including carbon offsets, packaging claims and environmental seals of approval.

“I would expect that they’re going to require more concrete showing of environmental benefits, and insubstantial environmental harm associated with anything that wants to claim green, friendly or eco-conscious terms,” he said. To the extent it’s been undefined, the bar has been pretty low.”

Almost certainly issuance of the guidelines will increase enforcement and litigation around green issues, Mr. Cole said.

Some of that will come from the FTC itself. During the first two years of the Obama administration, the FTC has already brought seven environmental advertising enforcement actions, compared to zero during the eight years of the Bush administration.

It’s unclear whether the new regulations will favor any one class of advertisers over another, Mr. Cole said. But an increase in litigation or arbitration of green claims could favor bigger marketers in a space where many key players remain relatively small independents, such as Seventh Generation and Method. The bigger players have bigger pockets and in-house counsel to handle litigation.

Spokespeople for both those companies said they’re following the development of the Green Guides closely but have no predictions on how they’ll look.

The Green Guides aren’t new laws; rather, they’re an update of how the FTC will interpret its mandate to enforce longstanding laws against unfair and deceptive advertising. Still, the spokesman said the FTC will treat them like other new regulations, publishing them in the Federal Register and instituting a comment period before they become final.

The amount of plastic hasn’t changed in two decades despite a sharp increase in plastic production and trash, according to a recent report published in Science.The researchers surmise that either people aren’t dumping trash in the water or the plastic, weighed down by bacteria and other organisms, could be dropping to lower ocean depths. Another possibility: plankton or fish could be eating the plastic and its chemicals.

“I think it’s certain that the plastic is breaking down into pieces smaller than what we capture in the net,” co-author Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer with the Sea Education Association (SEA) at Woods Hole, Mass., told LiveScience, an online news source.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE:  http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/08/ocean-garbage-patch-remains-mystery/1

The university’s dining services has continued to sell bottle water throughout the summer but will not replenish its stock.

While family, friends and graduates drank over 6,000 bottles of water at the ceremony for the class of 2010, bottled water will no longer be sold in any dining hall locations. However, bottled water will be provided at select university events and there is no ban preventing students from bringing bottled water on campus.

The leader of the bottled water ban movement, sophomore Tyler Hess, said that he is still excited about the ban.

“It’s just incredible,” he said. “I understand that it will be an adjustment regardless of whether or not they supported the ban, but for me, it’s just awesome.”

General Manager of Dining Services Steve Santo said that the ban signaled the end of a money-maker.

“We are losing the sale of bottled water,” he said. “It’s a cheap product that many people buy, because it is a convenience.”

The decision to ban bottled water was announced at the end of last school year. The administration discussed the logistics of the proposal last May. President Brian Casey said the administration felt it was a reasonable proposal.

“The changes it will have – it’s difficult to predict,” Casey said. “I suspect we’ll feel our way through it.”

However, many students did not have time to voice their reactions, as the announcement came on the penultimate day of finals.

Vice President of Student Life Cindy Babington said that she hadn’t heard many negative reactions to the ban.

“I haven’t had a huge opportunity to talk to students or hear about their reactions, I just know that there was a lot of student and faculty and staff support for the initiative when it all came about in the spring.”

Read the rest here:  http://media.www.thedepauw.com/media/storage/paper912/news/2010/08/21/News/University.Bans.Bottled.Water.Installs.Filling.Stations.On.Campus-3924377.shtml