San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has passed one of the strictest bans on bottled water in the nation.
The ban, approved Tuesday, will phase out the sale of bottled water of less than 21 ounces from city property.
The ban will eventually extend to large events like the Outside Lands festival.
As an alternative to bottled water, supervisors want the city to provide better access to Hetch Hetchy tap water.
“Bottled water is incredibly harmful to the environment,” Think Outside the Bottle campaign organizer Katherine Sawyer said. “It takes a plastic water bottle about a thousand years to biodegrade, and it’s just unnecessary to commodify water in a bottle when we have almost universal access to safe healthy tap water.”
Foot races and other sporting events would be exempt from the ordinance.
Recology estimates it collects about 15 million plastic water bottles a year.
