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The Poison We Pay For: As Federal Budget Cuts Slash Public Water, Big Plastic Wins
Federal cuts to drinking water programs and regulations will further erode trust in tap water, worsening water inequity and the plastic pollution crisis.
Jun 27, 2025
As the Trump administration works to finalize next year’s budget, we must pay attention to funds for drinking water. The currently proposed federal funding cuts will weaken the ability of public water systems to ensure safe water, diminish trust in tap water, and increase business for plastic bottled water—the de facto response when water systems falter.
But what could be more important than access to clean water? To some industries, it seems the answer is profit—especially for Big Plastic.
Water is essential for all life, and access to safe drinking water is an internationally recognized human right. To deny water is to deny health.
It is critical that funding be redirected into public drinking water systems, away from corporate handouts and privatization of our precious freshwater resources.
President Donald Trump says his administration wants “really clean water.” However, it’s difficult to see how dismantling Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation and capacity, rolling back federal clean water protections, and drastically cutting drinking water infrastructure will lead to anything but the pollution of billions of single-use plastic bottles, increased threats to public health, and worsening water injustice.
The White House’s fiscal year 2026 budget plans to slash funding for the Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds by nearly 90%. This funding is the primary source of federal support for water infrastructure across the nation, and has been underfunded for decades. In fact, these new proposed cuts layer onto a near 80% decline in investment in public water systems between 1977 and 2017, which has left many Americans exposed to aging and insufficient infrastructure, and at times, unsafe water. It also doesn’t make good economic sense: Estimates show the proposed cuts will result in the loss of 38,622 American jobs and $6.47 billion in economic output.
Enter: Big Plastic
In the United States, federal cuts will leave state and local governments trying to pick up the tab. Water systems have already raised water rates to cover existing funding gaps, causing a deepening water affordability crisis, only made worse by increasing water privatization. High water rates result in mounting household water debts and shut offs—a practice United Nations experts consider a violation of human rights.
Water insecurity only deepens our reliance on the manufactured “savior” to these crises: plastic packaged water. When the ability of water systems to do proper maintenance and infrastructure improvement is undermined, and communities can’t reliably access or trust safe water coming from the tap, they often turn to or are pushed onto bottled water.
Nearly 90% of Americans consume some bottled water, and 20% consume only bottled water. Bottled water is big business; in fact, it’s the most consumed beverage in the U.S. and worldwide. Globally, more than 1 million plastic bottles are sold every minute, and around 600 billion plastic bottles are produced every year. The global revenue of bottled water is projected to surge to $509.18 billion by 2030, up from $372.70 billion in 2025. The U.S. contributes the largest share of this market.
Central to the bottled water industry’s profiteering is fear mongering about tap water.
Despite having some of the overall highest quality tap water in the world, disinvestment in public drinking water infrastructure and deregulation has led some U.S. communities to have valid concerns about the safety of their public water. Over 9.2 million households still have toxic lead pipes bringing water to their taps, and nearly half of the U.S. has PFAS contaminating their water. These crises, as well as other safe drinking water violations, disproportionately occur in low-income, rural, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.
But the plastic bottled water industry explicitly targets these communities with advertisement campaigns and exploits drinking water crises for profit by mythologizing their product as a “safe solution” as opposed to the regrettable replacement it is in many circumstances.
First myth: bottled water is the safer, purer option.
Bottled water does not face the same health standards as tap water. Companies are required to test their water quality far less frequently than public water systems. And while public water systems always have to notify the public when there is a drinking water violation, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates bottled water as a food product, does not have this same requirement to inform consumers about contamination and recalls. Staff cuts at the FDA threaten to further weaken the enforcement of bottled water regulations.
Moreover, nearly two-thirds of plastic bottled water is repackaged tap water. The plastic bottles then add to that water toxic chemicals that can leach from the bottle itself, including PFAS and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals. It should come as no surprise that the amount of microplastics in bottled water is far higher than in tap water.
Second myth: Bottled water is inexpensive.
Bottled water is not affordable, costing households hundreds to thousands of times more per year than tap water, and further entrenching wealth disparities. In emergencies, municipalities and residents seeking an alternative water supply are often subject to price gouging for plastic bottles. Low-income communities with poor infrastructure are the least trusting of tap water and most reliant on bottled, paying more for an inferior commodity than wealthier households pay for a safe tap. Budget cuts will deepen water insecurity and lead more people to bottled water use.
Third myth: bottled water is sustainable and recyclable.
Ninety-nine percent of plastics are made from fossil fuels, plunging the planet deeper into the climate crisis. Communities on the frontlines and fencelines of fossil fuel extraction, plastic production, and landfill and incineration sites are recurrently exposed to highly toxic chemicals and polluted air, soil, and water. Plastic production itself requires a massive amount of water, both for the extraction of oil and for the cooling of plastic pellets. And bottlers are drying up local groundwater resources. Overall, an estimated 2,000 times more energy is needed to produce bottled water than to supply tap water.
And those bottles never go away. Municipalities have to pay massive sums to deal with plastic bottle pollution and the few bottles that are reclaimed. Plastic bottles most often end up in landfills or incinerators, are shipped overseas under the guise of “recycling” only to be dumped and open-burned, leading to further serious pollution, injustice, and greenhouse gas emissions. In all cases, plastic bottles—like all plastics—break up into micro- and nanoplastics, polluting our bodies and environment.
The bottled water industry is undermining safe public drinking water infrastructure and investment everywhere. According to 2016 estimates, it would take less than half of global annual bottled water sales to ensure safe drinking water supply across the world.
Federal cuts to drinking water programs and regulations will further erode trust in tap water, worsening water inequity and the plastic pollution crisis. It is critical that funding be redirected into public drinking water systems, away from corporate handouts and privatization of our precious freshwater resources.
Call your senators and representatives to oppose these proposed cuts to drinking water infrastructure and ensure the human right to public, safe water is protected.
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Lingering Poison: My Witness to Deepwater Horizon’s Legacy on the Gulf Coast
Fifteen years after the oil spill, the legacy of Corexit dispersants continues to manifest in the broken bodies and shattered lives of those who were exposed, including those who spoke out to save future generations.
Apr 20, 2025
As the mother of a childhood cancer survivor from a coastal Alabama cluster, I reflect on the 15th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster with anger and frustration at the countless lives needlessly destroyed by the spill and its “cleanup.” But more than anything, I am afraid… I am afraid because the same chemicals that wrought havoc on Gulf communities aren’t being disposed of—they are being rebranded to be reused.
During my seven years of assisting cleanup workers at a Miami-based law firm and Government Accountability Project, I saw the stuff of medical nightmares manifest in real life as I came face-to-face with an innocuously named monster: Corexit. Corexit is a chemical oil dispersant that was used liberally in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster to break up oil slicks into smaller droplets that can be submerged underwater. While Corexit was once described as being “as safe as dish soap” by a BP executive, the final chapter of its use in the Deepwater Horizon disaster was not to be told via feel-good commercials of freshly cleaned ducklings. It is still being written by outsiders documenting the broken lives of the men and women who can no longer speak for themselves after volunteering to clean the Gulf.
Many of the men and women who volunteered to clean the Gulf, a body of water that bound together their communities, jobs, and very way of life, died in the months and years after exposure to Corexit, often from serious diseases including blood and pancreatic cancers—silencing their voices long before justice could be served. I personally knew dozens who were exposed and subsequently left the Earth far too soon.
The corporate shell game of rebranding these toxic chemicals under new names must not distract us from the fundamental truth that these dispersants should never be used again in our waters.
I still think about Captain Bill, who came to us when Stage 4 colon cancer appeared after running a supply boat to the sinking Deepwater Horizon rig. He did not believe all the hype from environmentalists about the dangers of dispersants until he got crop-dusted with them. He developed softball sized cysts all over his body filled with bacteria and was left with just months to live. He left behind a wife and three children, including a young son with autism.
I remember Sandra, a woman who always exuded joy during the 20 years I’d known her. Her job for BP required her to hop on and off oil-contaminated boats; she tragically developed a rare myeloproliferative disorder that ended her life at age 60. She left behind a husband who missed her so profoundly that he lasted only a few months without her.
Corexit has been proven to have deadly side effects within humans, but that won’t stop corporate greed from slapping a new label on it and sending it to a different country. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was in the process of finalizing new rules and regulations governing the usage of oil dispersants. Right before the rules were set to be finalized, the manufacturer of Corexit abruptly discontinued its product line which constituted over 45% of globally stockpiled dispersants. This was likely not coincidental; the new EPA rules require manufacturers to truthfully report known or anticipated harm to human health and wildlife from their products. Corexit’s parent company chose to withdraw from the U.S. market while re-registering the same toxic products in the United Kingdom and Brazil in 2024, with France also considering approval.
People and communities were falsely reassured about the safety of the working conditions, as BP told workers personal protective gear was unnecessary when dealing with the chemicals. Now, with the risks and threats of exposure known, the protective gear could have saved hundreds of lives and communities from devastation.
Fifteen years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the legacy of Corexit dispersants continues to manifest in the broken bodies and shattered lives of those who were exposed, including those who spoke out to save future generations. The corporate shell game of rebranding these toxic chemicals under new names must not distract us from the fundamental truth that these dispersants should never be used again in our waters. The time has come to close this dark chapter in our history and commit to solutions that truly protect both our coasts and the people who call them home.
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Trump’s Embrace of Plastic Straws Won’t Make America Healthy Again
The harmful effects of plastics on human health should be a primary concern for any administration that claims to value human life.
Feb 12, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which reverses the push for paper straws in favor of plastic ones—based on the claim that paper straws don’t work (which, by the way, isn’t true)—is about way more than just straws. It is designed to undercut the Biden administration’s 2022 initiative to phase out single-use plastics, including straws, containers, and bottles, from federal buildings by 2032.
While the administration’s EO focus might seem to be shining a light on a seemingly trivial issue, it is a symptom of a much larger, and much more alarming problem: plastic pollution and its impact on all of us. Plastic is a human health crisis in the making and this decision is more than absurd—it’s actually dangerous.
Firstly, while banning plastic straws specifically is not all about saving turtles and trashing the ocean—we are in fact by using them helping to trash the oceans.
This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil.
Plastics have become a pervasive pollutant with 8 million tonnes of plastic dumped in our oceans every single year, killing marine life, including whales and seabirds at an alarming rate. One million sea turtles alone die every year from ingesting plastic trash. That represents 10% of the entire global population.
Researchers estimate there are around 199 million tonnes of plastic contaminating our marine environment already, and every year we do not take action and instead back plastic, that number rises.
Much of this largely single-use plastic, like straws, eventually breaks down into microplastics, smaller than a grain of rice. So, when we eat fish, we are consuming all the plastic junk and chemicals they have been ingesting too.
Which might help to explain why scientists have found plastic particles in human brains, lungs, hearts, and even placentas. We are poisoning our own babies with plastics, even before they are born.
These microplastics are harmful in their own right but, they also leach out toxic plastic chemicals, like Bisphenol A and phthalates, both known endocrine disruptors. Exposure to these chemicals in early development can have lifelong effects on a child's health, from developmental delays to ADHD, autism, and increased risks of certain cancers. These chemicals are even linked to miscarriages and infertility.
We already know that babies and infants appear to be ingesting high levels of microplastics because a study by scientists from Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland discovered they had over 10 times higher rates of microplastics in their feces samples than adults.
From the moment we wake up to the time we go to sleep, we are being exposed to microplastics—whether through the food we eat, the water we drink, or the air we breathe.
The harmful effects of plastics on human health should be a primary concern for any administration that claims to value human life. So, the president’s focus on supporting plastic straws is worryingly indicative of a disregard for the growing scientific consensus on the dangers of microplastics and the chemicals used to make plastics in general.
This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil. Why? Because plastics are made from petrochemicals, this order therefore supports the fossil fuel industry. An industry already wreaking havoc on our planet by fueling climate change.
If we are serious about safeguarding human health, we must shift away from our throwaway plastic culture that has dominated our society for decades. The impacts of plastic pollution on our health, and our babies’ too, are far-reaching and catastrophic. It's time for our leaders to prioritize the health of people, not the interests of the plastic industry.
As the debate over plastic straws continues, which it will, we need to refocus the conversation on the real, life-threatening dangers posed by plastic pollution. It is time to recognize that this is not a fight over a straw—it is a fight for children’s health.
Which is why EARTHDAY.ORG is running an End Plastic Initiatives—so we can continue to drive public support around making a stand against plastic pollution and in the process protect our planet—and more importantly our health—for generations to come. The fight continues. Plastic is Toxic. DON’T GO BACK TO PLASTICS!
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