Tucked away in the verdant little New Jersey village of Chatham, Lydia Chambers washes her hands with tap water.

Active in the community and schools she’s been instrumental in the launch of a small but important entrepreneurial business selling customized stainless steel water bottles that has ballooned into a grassroots movement to eradicate plastic water bottles for good.

All sounds perfectly suburban until you figure in Lydia’s somewhat carbonic past - she was a geologist for Shell and Exxon.  The job of pointing the drills down the right path was hers alone, siphoning deciliters of crude up from their ancient reservoirs into freight liners headed to local refineries.

It took the birth of her two sons and a life restructuring apotheosis to overcome the internal conflict of  applying her expert knowledge of the earth only to aid in its exploitation.  Indeed, not an easy decision with handsome wages from big oil and two kids to raise, Lydia bravely made the leap and the work she’s doing now brings great honor to her expertise.

GA: Let me get a little back story on this.  Your background is in geology.  So what sort of brought this whole thing about?

LC: Well I got into geology because I’ve always been really interested in the earth and cared for it deeply.  And then I worked for Shell and Exxon and ended up realizing that wasn’t for me and I had children.  Then I became active in my own community doing some grassroots environmental campaigns as a volunteer.  I’ve worked on anti-pesticide campaigns and anti-idling campaigns.  And a year and a half ago, I ran into some parents who were expressing their concern about the large number of disposable plastic bottles strewn around the playing fields in town.  We just together decided to have a grassroots campaign in Chatham, NJ to reduce the consumption of bottled water.  At first their interest was in reducing the waste, as in the trash, and encouraging people to recycle but then we looked into it and realized that the recycling rates are so low that really for plastic bottles they’re 23% in the United States so recycling isn’t really the answer.  Part of the first challenge was educating people and we went first to the town and the recreation department was very interested in partnering with us because they don’t want their fields strewn with all these bottles. Then we went to the schools and they were also concerned about the waste and the school also saw it as an opportunity to raise the students awareness about sustainability and to teach them about the life cycle of a product.  We realized though that this is not an environmental concern that a lot of people have, they don’t really think of bottled water as an environmental concern.  But what we discovered when we did the research was that each bottle of water, a 17oz bottle of water, requires a half a cup of oil to make and produce.

GA: Not vegetable oil.

LC: Not vegetable oil, no! Petroleum that had to be drilled out of the ground someplace and refined and sent to a chemical plant to be made into plastic.  It also takes 3x the amount of water that you put in the bottle to turn the petroleum into plastic.  And it also creates carbon dioxide so it has a carbon footprint associated with it just in the manufacturing of the bottle and then of course the transportation of the bottle to you to the store and then of course, picking up the bottle if you recycle it or if it’s going in a garbage truck to a landfill or a recycling center.  So there’s this carbon footprint, there’s the water that’s required, the oil that’s required so it takes resources and it creates trash.  The numbers are just unbelievable!  In the United States, the average American consumes 167 bottles of water each year and when you do the numbers that actually adds up to 100 million disposable plastic bottles go to landfills every day.  So if you lined them up end to end, it would stretch from the East Coast of the United States to China and back, every day.  That’s just such an amazing amount of waste.  Our first step was to create materials to teach the kids to raise the teacher’s awareness and the  other parents in town.  You can’t tell people not to do something without giving them a solution.  So I did about a month’s worth of research to discover what’s the best reusable bottle and discovered that stainless steel bottles are probably the healthiest bottle.

GA: What are some of the other options out there?

LC: There’s aluminum and aluminum bottles need to be lined and so we decided not to go with that because aluminum leaches.  And of course, there’s other plastic bottles.  It’s readily accepted that plastic 2, 4, and 5 are safe but you wanna avoid the other plastics like for instance, you don’t want to reuse plastic 1, the resin code at the bottom of any bottle will have the triangle with the number inside.  Number 1 bottles are disposable; they’re flimsy and you can’t really get them clean, they have a narrow neck, so it’s more of a cleanliness issue, so you don’t reuse 1, so you can reuse 2, 4, and 5.  I’m a cyclist also and I know that most plastic bottles are made of plastic 4 but they wear and they leak.  There are other options out there and at the time last fall, there were concerns about some of the plastic bottles, plastic #7, which is an “other” category with a lot of different kinds of plastic but some of them, polycarbonate, has BPA, bisphenol-A, so that can leach into your drink so we decided to just not take the plastic route.

GA: Just to sort of clarify the categories of plastics, I mean, what there’s 12 or something like that?

LC: Actually there’s 7 resin categories, resin codes.  As I said, 1 through 6 are a particular resin and they have different uses and one is PET and that’s always the disposable type.  2, 4, and 5 are reusable and so many bottles and containers that we eat out of are made of 2, 4, and 5.  3 and 6, you don’t wanna eat out of them, PVC and Styrofoam you should really avoid eating out of.  And then 7 is this “other” category which some are good and some are bad.  So you really have to know which 7, which types of plastic it is.

GA: It’s just the hardness and the softness…

LC: There’s probably hundreds of different plastics in the 7 category but at the time we started this project, 7 was mostly polycarbonate when it was in a bottle.  But now with the concerns with BPA there are other 7 plastics that are available in plastic bottles.

GA: With your bottle you can have it be sort of a custom thing or part of the equipment of your sports team of or your corporation…

LC: Sure, so that’s one of the things we did.  We made it attractive to the kids by putting their school logo on the bottle and they were very excited.  We ended up selling about 1,500 bottles in Chatham to a student population of about 1,500 kids so they were very excited to have their school logo.  Because of the success of the grassroots campaign, that’s when we ended up starting a business.

GA: We know why the plastic bottle should be replaced and eliminated if at all possible but are we worried that we’re replacing a bottle with another bottle.  Are you aware of the footprint of the manufacturing of a stainless steel bottle and does it “zero out” ultimately?

LC: It does not zero out quickly.  It zeroes out in about six months. So yes, there’s absolutely a footprint associated with a stainless steel bottle which, if you’re comparing it to a plastic bottle, it’s greater, the stainless steel bottle is.  But if you’re comparing it to bottled water, it’s in about six months, you’ve made a better choice to get a reusable bottle.  In fact, in our campaign we said we don’t want you to buy a bottle unless you’re going to use it so if people are gonna buy it and put it in their cabinet then we’ve not made any improvement in our carbon footprint.  So many of us are on the go so much of the time and there’s not always tap water readily available in water fountains so with the way we all live our lives in the United States you have to have a way to bring water with you.  So given that, you need to choose a reusable bottle that’s gonna be durable.  Stainless steel, the good thing about it also is that it doesn’t smell, it doesn’t absorb odors the way plastic does and actually drinks stay cold in metal bottle so your water’s gonna taste better.

GA: Where can we find some more information about Back-2-Tap?

LC: You can go to the internet and go to our website which is easy to remember it’s “back,” B-A-C-K, the number “2,” and “tap” dot com.  So Back2Tap.com.

Photos courtesy of mohq, Thomas Net, Kyle Gehmlich, and mondopiccolo.