What you buy for $1.50 in the lunch line and enjoy for a few minutes of the day can stick around for generations and cause irreversible damage to the planet.

At one point in time, I bet you’ve heard that plastic water bottles are damaging to the planet or unsustainable in one way or another. Environmental topics like this –  that people might have felt hesitant to discuss in the past – have been in the spotlight lately in the world and at LFHS.

Our school has definitely been becoming more environmentally-conscious these past few years, with the implementation of environment-based classes and clubs, s well as eco-friendly alternatives to plastic water bottles like the new drinking fountain bottle fillers.

That’s why it’s so surprising that LFHS has their own personal line of plastic water bottles, the Scout Fuel bottle.

The reason we need this change- a ban of Scout Fuel water bottles- is simple. These plastic bottles hurt all aspects of the world: humans, animals, and our environment overall.

Plastic water bottles use vast amounts of oil, other fossil fuels, and water to be created in factories and then shipped around the world. When fossil fuels are burned they give off pollutants such as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, as well numerous other pollutants that hurt the environment and public health.

Climate change and global warming can be traced back to the greenhouse gases that these pesky plastic water bottles produced, and this could easily be eliminated by using tap water or a reusable water bottle instead.

Scout Fuel bottles might be harmful to the students at our school that consume them, too. Scientists at Goethe University in Germany found that estrogenic compounds leach from the plastic into the water, and it appears possible that some unidentified chemicals in these plastics have the potential to interfere with estrogen and other reproductive hormones.

These toxins can leach out of the plastic bottles when they are exposed to heat or sit around too long.

If hurting the environment and people isn’t enough, plastic water bottle caps often end up in the stomachs of many of our planet’s marine and aquatic species. The issue of plastic straws is under the spotlight right now, but plastic caps are just as harmful to marine life around the world.

The use of these bottles is not as detrimental when they are recycled, and can be used to make items like t-shirts, sweaters, insulation for jackets, and more. But the environmental organization “Ban the Bottle” found that out of the 50 billion water bottles used in America each year, 38 billion of them are not recycled.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that America’s recycling rate is at a mere 35 percent, so these plastic water bottles are doing much more damage than good to our planet.

One might argue that there are recycling bins and posters that identify what can be recycled in most classrooms and lunchrooms, but in all reality, for every one student that uses the recycling bin, a few others are putting their plastic bottle in the trash can.

As well as this, one might argue that these Scout Fuel bottles help our school bring in money, or are more convenient than a reusable water bottle, but that extra bit of money or convenience in the lunch line is definitely not worth the damage to our planet.

The United States is currently the largest consumer market for bottled water around the world, so let’s do our part as a pretty large school and help decrease this number.

Let’s better our environment, the health of our student body, and all of the species in which we share the earth with by eliminating Scout Fuel plastic water bottles from our school.

Let’s ban Scout Fuel bottles at LFHS once and for all.