The Daily Collegian The Daily Collegian Elizabeth Murphy Editor in Chief Kelsey Thompson Business Manager About the Collegian: The Daily Collegian and The Weekly Collegian are pub lished by Collegian Inc., an independent, nonprofit cor poration with a board of directors composed of stu dents, faculty and profes sionals. Pennsylvania State University students write and edit both papers and solicit advertising for them. During the fall and spring semes ters as well as the second six-week summer session, The Daily Collegian publish es Monday through Friday. Issues are distributed by mail to other Penn State campuses and individual subscribers. Complaints: News and edi torial complaints should be presented to the editor. Business and advertising complaints should be pre sented to the business man ager. Who we are Hie Dally Collegian’s edito rial opinion is determined by its Board of Opinion, with the editor holding final responsibility. The letters and columns expressed on the editorial pages are not necessarily those of The Daily Collegian, Collegian Inc. or The Pennsylvania State University. Collegian Inc., publishers of The Daily Collegian and related publi cations, is a separate corpo rate institution from Penn State. Editorials are written by The Daily Collegian Board of Opinion. Members are: Kevin Cirilli, Jenna Ekdahl, Bill Landis, Elizabeth Mur phy, Laura Nichols, Edgar Ramirez, Andrew Robinson, Heather Schmelzlen, Jared Shanker, Katie Sullivan, Alex Weisler, Steph Witt and Chris Zook. Letters We want to hear your com ments on our coverage, editorial decisions and the Penn State community. ■ E-mail collegianletters@psu.edu ■ Online www.psucollegian.com ■ Postal mail/In person 123 S. Burrowes St. University Park, PA .16801 Letters should be about 200 words. Student letters should include class year, major and campus. Letters from alumni should include year of graduation. All writers should provide their address and phone number for verification. Letters should be signed by no more than two peo ple. Members of organiza tions must include their titles if the topic they write about is connected with the aim of their groups. The Collegian reserves the right to edit letters. The Collegian cannot guaran tee publication of all let ters it receives. Letters chosen also run on The Daily Collegian Online and may be selected for publi cation in The Weekly Colle gian. All letters become property of Collegian Inc. Green area a positive solution The saga is finally com ing to a close. The former Phi Delta Theta fraternity house now in the hands of Penn State after a protracted legal battle with the build ing’s former tenants is slated for demolition. The university plans to devel op a “green space” at the property, and the century old house will be torn down. Some in the greek com munity like Interfrater nity Council President Max Wendkos have decried the university’s decision, citing the Well, the good news is that they finally capped Mel's mouth... but it is probably too late to save his career. Bottled water hurting environment and your wallets By Andrew Metcalf Would you pay $30,000 for a sandwich? What if I told you that the bread is the healthiest bread available, flown in halfway across the world from the finest farmers? What if I gave it to you in a nice plastic box, keeping the sandwich clean and requiring nothing more than being thrown away after you use it? Would you buy this sandwich? Probably not. You can get a sandwich at your local deli for about one five-thou sandth of my price. So why do we pay that much more for bottled water? We have readily available tap water which costs us on average $0,002 per gal lon, yet we spend upwards of $l.OO for a 16-oz bottle of water. Sure, no one claims that the water from your tap comes from artisan springs in Fiji, but they aren’t demanding that you pay five thousand times more for the water either. Bottled water companies very cleverly market its product, con vincing consumers water from mountains in remote places is supe rior to tap water. In reality, the water quality is about the same. house’s historic signifi cance. We see both sides of the story, but we ultimately agree with the universi ty’s decision. A park-like area will jibe well with the house’s neighbors Penn State landmarks like West Halls and the IST Building. Though it’s disappoint ing that a historic house will be tom down, it’s clear that the building’s former tenants didn’t care much for its legacy or dig nity The house fell into disrepair in the the frater nity’s care. Bottled water is regulated far less strictly than tap water. Disposable plastic bottles are unarguably terrible for the environ ment. They require large amounts of oil, water and energy to produce. They are typically manufactured in third world countries with less stringent pollution regulations, and the toxic runoff from the production is often dumped directly into local waterways. We thro>v away or litter about three-quarters of the plastic bottles we consume, but even those that are recycled never get remade into another plastic bottle. Unlike alu minum and glass containers, which can be recycled infinitely, plastic can typically only be “downcyded” turned into products such as plastic bags or blended into other materials. While this might be bet ter than a landfill, it is still a non solution. MY OPINION In truth, bottled water is no more damaging to the environment than any other bottled beverage. Many drink companies waste carbon ship ping their product all over the world before it reaches you, and the plas tic bottles they use are equally non recyclable. The reason environmentalists target bottled water in particular is that it’s completely nonessential. If you want a drink of Dr. Pepper, you have to buy it in some sort of con tainer rities don’t provide us with municipal supplies of Dr. Pepper. It’s not the university’s job to restore the house and it’s not as if the uni versity has the millions of dollars the project would require just lying around somewhere. It’s a shame that a building that has seen so much Penn State history is ending its run with such little dignity. Still, the university’s decision to create an aes thetically pleasing “green space” in the center of campus seems reasonable and represents a chance for the property’s legacy to be redeemed. vws K S ~0/edc, '■ s,t ’'" However, if you want a drink of water, it’s easy and cheap to get it from the tap. We are enormously fortunate to have access to clean and safe drink ing water for an immeasurably low cost. Many places in the world have no such thing. Sure, our municipal water infra structure costs billions per year in taxes to construct and maintain, but I doubt anyone would be willing to cut that cost. We use our water sup ply to take showers, wash our dish es and water our plants. Most prod ucts you see in a store depend on clean and cheap water at some point in their supply chain. We need to maintain a municipal water system, so why shouldn’t we take advantage of it and drink its water? Buying bottled water, given our access to safe and exponentially cheaper tap water, is both environ mentally inexcusable and fiscally foolish. I’m not trying to argue that bot tled water is completely useless it’s incredibly vital for emergency situations. But I don’t think the sup ply for those instances requires the massive bottled water industry we’ve set up today. A very small fraction of the bottled water we pro duce in the world goes to situations where safe tap water is unavailable. The manufacturing facilities required to meet that demand would cost far less than the $lOl bil lion the world spends annually on Thursday, July 29,2010 I 3 EDITOR IN CHIEF No Liz, no Alex, no problem On Monday, The Daily Collegian was written, produced and edited without both the editor in chief (me) and the managing editor (my partner in crime, Alex Weisler). And it’s all Buffalo’s fault. Alex and I took a break from the office this weekend and traveled to Toronto for Lilith Fair .After belting out Mary J. Blige and Sarah McLachlan all night long Saturday, we hopped in the car Sunday at a gingerly 7:30 a.m. We had a board of editors meeting to catch in State College later that afternoon. About two hours into the drive, we stopped for coffee at Tim Hortons in Buffalo. Just outside, to be exact. We were in the beautiful destination of Tonawanda, N.Y All I know about Tonawanda is that I have a tough time pronouncing it, and it is also the location of my Ford Taurus’s near-demise. Almost immediately after pulling out of the store, the Taurus begin emitting plumes of smoke and the smell of burn ing rubber filled the car. Alex pulled over into a shopping com plex parking lot and we just stared at each other. “The paper,” we both said with a scared laugh. [...] We were not leaving Buffalo my car couldn’t be worked on until the morning. We made a hotel reservation at nearby Buffalo suburb Amherst. ... On the side of the road we finalized a plan: Visual Editor Heather Schmezlen would serve in our roles for the day, reading all of the news content in the paper and making decisions about layout and headlines. We were asking a lot of a staff that is already very small. We were asking even more of Heather. Somehow, it worked. It wasn’t like any other day in the newsroom on Sunday, but it definitely didn’t show.... u So, I salute this summer staff.... Elizabeth Murphy Editor in Chief Read more of The Daily Collegian's blogs at psucollegian.com/blogs. Wanted: Web Intern The Collegian is seeking a web intern for the fall semester to join its award-winning web team. This position offers a merit based $l,OOO scholarship per semester. We are diving into several new web ini tiatives this fall including a brand new website, and are looking for applicants with a working knowledge of HTML, CSS and proficiency in at least one of the fol lowing: Javascript, Flash, PHEJ Perl, ASPnet, or C#. We are also looking into mobile applications, as well, so a knowl edge of or interest in learning about mobile development is encouraged but not required. You will be working with the Web Editor, who also has a knowledge of these tech nologies. This position requires a flexible but steady time commitment. Your respon sibilities will vary based on your skills, but could include designing pages and/or interactive pieces for our site, writing scripts to parse and reformat old stories or communicate with public APIs (Twitter, Tumblr, etc), or designing back-end man agement systems, among other things. An interest in journalism and being a part of an independent student newspaper is highly encouraged, as well. To apply, send a resume and cover letter to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Murphy at editorinchfef@psucolleglan.coin. bottled water, according to The Water Project. I would love it if we stopped drink ing bottled water entirely in devel oped countries, but I don’t think a ban on its production or sale is the appropriate step to take. A more sensible solution is to vote with our wallets, but on a larger scale. Specifically, institutions such as loci governments and universities should consider eliminating bottled water purchases from their budg ets. This would mostly translate to bottled water no longer being avail able at catering events or sold at student stores. Reusable bottles or cups combined with water bottles and pitchers would easily pick up the slack. Such measures could potentially save a university like Penn State tens of thousands of dollars. Would that be enough to fix massive deficits? Of course not. But in this economy, every dollar counts. It could potentially translate to one or two staff members keep ing their jobs. If organizations around the coun try enacted similar purchasing bans, bottled water companies would have to reduce production levels, eventually breaking our addi tion to this wasteful product. Andrew Metcalf is a senior majoring in computer science and is the Collegian's Thursday columnist. His e-mail address is admsl29@psu.edu.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers