We got this bad boy titled “Your Aquafina Monstrosity” in our inbox and couldn’t help but feel for VCU student J. Reed R. Braden.
We got this bad boy titled “Your Aquafina Monstrosity” in our inbox and couldn’t help but feel for VCU student J. Reed R. Braden. It appears Braden stumbled upon a free water giveaway offered by the PepsiCo brand Aquafina around VCU’s Monroe Park campus.
While we’re not one to wade into the waters of mega-soda corporate tomfoolery, Braden brings up some good points about offering what amounts to tap water in often not-recycled plastic bottles. Then there’s the campus’s special water fountains designed to fill reusable water bottles… then there’s the broken-ass water fountains in Monroe Park.
Should VCU be bowing to Big Water? We don’t know, but we love a good rabble rousing.
Check out Braden’s letter below:
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Dear Diane Reynolds,
Ass. Vice President for Business Services for VCU:
(cc: a bunch of people related to ecology and administration at VCU, as well as a handful of local news organizations)
I was mortified today to see dozens of single-use plastic signs for an Aquafina giveaway, each pointing towards a colossal megalith of Pepsi-branded plastic piled high outside of Shafer Dining Hall. I was drawn to the hubris of this monument to corporate plastic products like a gnat to a giant bug-zapper.
VCU students HAVE free water. On nearly every floor of every single classroom and residency building, there are water fountains, sinks, and even specially designed fountains for filling reusable bottles. Every place that sells VCU merchandise, as well as nearly every other convenience store in Richmond, sells reusable bottles in a variety of materials. VCU does not have any need for additional plastic-bottled water.
I have lived in Richmond for six years, and I drink Richmond’s tap water every single day. I annually test the tap water in my home for lead, pesticide, nitrate, and bacterial contaminants, as well as its hardness, pH, and chlorination levels. Richmond’s tap water is consistently cleaner and safer than anywhere I have ever lived. There is a time and place for gargantuan deliveries of plastic-bottled water, and VCU today is far from that time and place. Perhaps campus and country could have been better served were all that water labeled, “From VCU,” and shipped off to Flint, MI, where the water crisis is still unsolved and unsolvable despite the current complete lack of media interest. To label it, “For VCU,” is as useless as it is vain.
I heard a student today in the library talking about this giveaway. He said to his friend, “I’mma get that free water though,” as he walked past a water fountain! I very nearly had a stroke.
Did you know that on the other side of Shafer Dining Hall, Monroe Park is filled with homeless people who are suffering from malnutrition; and that the park’s water fountains will not be fixed by the city until the city can be assured that the homeless won’t be their primary users? Take that water around the block and give it to the people who actually need it, since there’s nothing we can do now about the humongous stack of plastic-wrapped plastic that will necessarily be disposed of over the upcoming week.
And how will that plastic be disposed of? According to Columbia University’s Earth Institute, only 6.5% of that plastic will be recycled. The rest will go to the landfill where it will remain in perpetuity until long after our species goes extinct. A sizeable percentage of that landfill plastic will find its way into our waterways and join the floating gyres of plastic in the oceans which rival the average sovereign nation in land area. As the organizer of this event, this is indeed your fault.
Over the next two weeks, I will do my best to document the primary locations of Aquafina plastic bottle disposal (sidewalks, gutters, bushes, landfill-bound bins, etc.) and send pictures of these primary disposal sites to your email account. I hope that this project will enlighten both of us to the ecological stupidity of this sort of mass plastic distribution. I also sincerely hope that this profoundly annoys you.
J. Reed R. Braden
College of Humanities and Sciences,
School of World Studies
