Banning the sale of bottled water is not within the City's jurisdiction. We can and are increasing public access to water so people have access to a free healthy beverage instead of buying bottled water.

Have you seen the new portable water fountains around town? To help keep people hydrated this summer, the City just installed 5 drinking fountains. http://vancouver.ca/hotweather/fountains.htm

What is City of Vancouver doing about banning sales of single use plastic water bottles still remains clear. Why is Vancouver bent upon being the last to bring these changes?

Vancouver City Council committed to eliminating the availability of bottled water in its facilities as well as to increasing the availability of tap water in all new buildings in the spring of 2009. The City's waterworks department is working to make existing outdoor public fountains more functional, and is installing more options (fountains and taps) around the city.

Here's the link to the council report http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20090423/documents/csb3.pdf

I would *love* to see a return of drinking fountains that work in this city!

Given the fraudulent and polluting nature of the business it is amazing that legislators have taken no steps to ban this frivolous and toxic industry. But part of the problem is the paucity of fountains. City needs to be aggressive about installing them. In many malls there are no water fountains adjacent to the washrooms near food courts which is done on design in order to promote sales of the beverages from the vendors. That is an example of biased (favourable to vendors) building codes of food courts in the shopping malls. That omission on the part of the city needs to be corrected. Vancouver is very lethargic about not taking action against plastic bottles, plastic grocery bags, Styrofoam and such other packagings that are sold with impunity. What we trualy have over there is a Greenest City INACTION team that habitualy fetters discretion and does NOTHING to solve any issue that deserves to be attended. Part of the problem is the focus being only on climate change and not on biodiversity preservation. Even UN did set up IPCC but only recently setting up the biodiversity equivalent of that.