Vail Town Council wants a clear budget on proposed plastic water bottle ban

While the Vail Town Council currently has a lot of information about how a plastic water bottle ban in town would work, one key piece of the plan has not yet been revealed: the full cost.

The council, over the last year, has been supportive of an idea to phase out several plastic products in town, including water bottles under one gallon, takeout containers, cutlery, straws and cups with lids, in a similar move to other mountain towns like Breckenridge and municipalities in the Lake Tahoe area.

Town of Vail Environmental Sustainability Manager Beth Markham said she drew inspiration from the Lake Tahoe area, where a branding campaign called “Drink Tahoe Tap” was created alongside the single-use water bottle ban, and metal water bottles bearing that brand logo are now sold by local retailers.

“They have a partnership with Klean Kanteen; they have these water bottles that are for sale at their local grocery stores,” Markham said. “Some of the funds come back to their Tahoe Community Fund, the business that’s selling the bottles gets to keep the rest of the revenue from those bottles, and then there’s a map that they’ve created that shows where all of the water refill stations are located around town.”

The campaign touts the superiority of the city’s tap water, saying “Tahoe Tap is far, far, far more rigorously tested than anything you might buy in a plastic bottle,” and that most bottled water is “actually just tap water from downhill.”

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Several council members agreed with the idea to focus on reusable water bottles and the superiority of tap water in a campaign to eliminate single-use plastic water bottles in Vail, but the total cost of a program like that is unclear.

“Do we have the infrastructure in place in the town of Vail to provide more water refill stations?” asked council member Dave Chapin. “I don’t think we do, and I think it costs an arm and a leg.”

The discussion has taken place over the course of the last year, beginning in September of 2024, after the council heard from Aidan Kinsley, a sustainability intern at Walking Mountains, along with Declan Cunningham, a junior at Vail Mountain School.

Kinsley and Cunningham said Vail is a good place to institute a single-use plastics ban because the town has instituted other ordinances regarding sustainability, pointing to the town’s 2015 plastic bag ban as an example.

But the plastic bag ban was easy in comparison to a plastic water bottle ban, Chapin said.

“That’s not a necessary thing to keep you alive, keep you hydrated,” Chapin said of plastic bags.

Town Manager Russ Forrest, on Tuesday, said town staff will be finalizing a recommendation on an ordinance to present to the Town Council in the next few weeks.

Before he’s comfortable with an ordinance, Mayor Travis Coggin said the long-term budget on the program — looking several years out — will need to be clearer.

“Ideally, what we would get to is what they’ve got in Tahoe — that is a very robust program, there’s a lot there,” Coggin said. “That doesn’t happen in 12 months. That takes time to build awareness, make sure we’re working with our retail partners, and not really attacking our guests, who are buying a lot of these products.”