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| Renee Ross, a visitor from California, filling up a refillable backpack at Zion Park Visitors Center |
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Story and photos by Dan Mabbutt
If you’re planning on a hike in Zion National Park, take plenty of water. Also take your own refillable water bottle because you can’t buy water in disposable plastic bottles there… for now. Zion National Park—along with several other national parks—has agreements with vendors inside the park that prohibit the sale of water in disposable water bottles. In fact, none of the vendors at Utah’s “Mighty 5” national parks sell this item that often seen filling garbage cans at outdoor events or discarded on the side of the road. You won’t find them at Timpanogos Cave National Monument or Utah Natural Bridges and Hovenweep National Monument either. These national parks and monuments all provide water bottle filling stations. Colorado and Arizona also have several national parks banning disposable plastic water bottles, but Utah is the leader in trying to keep plastic bottles out of your vacation photos. However, pending legislation may ultimately repeal this ban.
For those understandably concerned with dehydration in this desert climate, rest assured; you can buy a refillable bottle in Zion National Park if you don’t have one of your own, and they provide free water filling stations to make using your bottle more convenient. Alyssa Baltrus, spokesperson for Zion National Park said visitors can, “get a bottle just as cheap as most bottled waters.” The Independent looked into this and found that the most popular 24-ounce brand of bottled water at the Sol Foods grocery store in Springdale costs $1.59. Baltrus said that refillable bottles are available at the gift shop in Zion for $3.29. So visitors to the park will be money ahead after refilling the bottle just twice, which means two fewer bottles to litter the landscape or be trucked to landfills. However, Baltrus told The Independent that in spite of their efforts to get people to use refillable bottles, Zion National Park recycled 28,000 pounds of plastic last year.
The amounts of recycled plastic from Zion National Park is only a small part of the problem. According to Catherine Clarke Fox at the National Geographic website, Americans use 29 billion water bottles a year.
“To make all these bottles, manufacturers use 17 million barrels of crude oil,” Fox wrote. “That’s enough oil to keep a million cars going for twelve months. Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That’s about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.”
Zion National Park was a leader in implementing this plastic water bottle ban as part of a 2011 National Park Service policy. Since then, representatives have said it has been a great success. Emily Barajas, the sustainability manager at Xanterra, the hospitality and concessions management company operating the Zion Lodge inside the Park, wrote in a letter to the Springdale Town Council that “over 80 percent of guests loved the policy” and that the environmental program “has consistently received over 91 percent approval rate in our post-stay evaluations.” Barajas continued to write, “I highly urge Springdale to look for more ways to support the Green Springdale branding.”
The Town of Springdale at the entrance to Zion National Park is fully in support of the Park’s policies against disposable plastics. If you book the Springdale-owned Canyon Community Center for an event, you must “use reusable dinnerware and tablecloths or paper or biodegradable products if reusable dinnerware is not available.” When it was reported in a Town Council meeting that, numerous people in the town didn’t like the ‘no plastics’ policy, a grassroots citizen effort produced a petition with two pages of signatures urging the Council to continue to enforce the Canyon Community Center policy.
In spite of the cost and waste of bottled water, on July 7, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment by Rep. Keith Rothfus (R-PA) to the House Interior Appropriations bill, H.R. 2822, which prohibits the National Park Service from using any funds to implement or maintain bans on the sale of bottled water at any national park. In a press release from Chris Hogan, the vice president of communications for the International Bottled Water Association, representing over 200 brands of bottled water, the IBWA applauded this move and pointed to a similar plastic water bottle ban at the University of Vermont, stating that it “resulted not only in a significant increase in the consumption of sugary drinks but also an increase, rather than a reduction, in the amount of plastic bottles entering the waste stream.”
The Independent attempted to contact the Washington office of Rep. Rothfus, but his office refused to comment. Representatives from Zion National Park were also unwilling to comment at this point on the pending legislation.
This is crazy!