A poster in the church advertising our water bottle sale. Photo via Kai Tsurumaki
On Sunday, December 21st, I went to help sell water bottles for Take Back the Tap at the Church of Saint Xavier. Take Back the Tap is a project of the Peace and Justice committee in the Church of Saint Francis Xavier. While drinking bottled water may seem like a healthy choice, buying single use water bottles is not good for the environment. If we all use reusable water bottles than not as much plastic will be wasted. The money from selling the reusable water bottles will go toward installing water fountains that use tap water in the parish to replace the filtered water containers that are currently being used.
I arrived there shortly before the 9:00 mass ended, a little before 10:00. When I went into the church found Daniela and Lynn Corwin, who we were selling the water bottles for, in the left corner. I took me a minute to find the place where we were selling the water bottles and so they had already sold a good amount before I got there. There was a small plastic table on which we were selling the water bottles. There was two different types of water bottles. A smaller blue one and a larger green one. They were both the same price, ten dollars, and the blue one seemed to be more popular. By the time everyone had left from the 9:00 mass 41 water bottles had been sold, so we had made 410 dollars, a fair amount.
After the first sale finished we started getting ready for the next mass. We made tags with a small message, and put them into all of the bottles. The tags said “Thank you! By using this reusable water bottle, you will be taking a step to mitigate the following problems: 17 million barrels of crude oil are used annually to manufacture plastic bottles for bottled water that are used once and then discarded. The rest go to landfills where they leach toxic chemicals into the land. Using tap water reduces CO2 emissions from the transport of bottled water. And … dependance on bottled water often translates into less attention given to upkeep of municipal water systems. Join St. Francis Xavier’s ‘TAKE BACK THE TAP’ campaign! Use your SFX refillable bottle! Share the info.” During the mass, while the other people helping me left to perform other duties, I tagged many of the bottles for that day and later dates. After the mass I sold a few bottles before the other people came back. By the end of that sale we unfortunately only sold another 17 bottles and received a 5 dollar donation for a total income of 175 dollars.
After the second sale I had to leave to do other things and left the church. I could not attend the sale after the 5:00 mass, but Daniela and Kiyomi both did, so we still had representatives for all the masses.
