14 DAY TRIAL // Starting January 1, 2013, the town of Concord in Middlesex County, Massachusetts no longer allows supermarkets and several other stores to sell single-serving plastic water bottles.
Thus, this town can be argued to have made bottled water illegal. For the time being, the ban only takes into consideration PET bottles whose capacity is of 1 liter (roughly 34 ounces) or less, but there is no telling what the future will bring.
“It shall be unlawful to sell non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less in the Town of Concord on or after January 1, 2013,” reads the official press release on this matter.
Interestingly enough, Concord's decision to outlaw the sale of bottled water is first and foremost based on environmental considerations.
More precisely, this town's residents hope that their new legislation concerning PET bottles will help cut down on the amounts of waste this town produces on a regular basis.
Furthermore, they believe that significant progress will be made in terms of reducing fossil fuels consumption, seeing how the process of manufacturing said plastic bottles has a significant ecological footprint.
This plastic bottle ban comes as a result of a three-year campaign (i.e. Ban the Bottle) organized and carried out by greenheads living in this part of the United States, Huffington Post reports.
As the people who put together this campaign argue, “It takes 17 million barrels of oil per year to make all the plastic water bottles used in the U.S. alone. That's enough oil to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year.”
Furthermore, “In 2007, Americans consumed over 50 billion single serve bottles of water. With a recycling rate of only 23%, over 38 billion bottles end up in landfills.”
Whoever chooses to disregard this ban faces a warning for their first offense, a $25 (about €18.88) fine for their second and a $50 (roughly €37.77) for their third.