Baraboo (May 29, 2008) --- St. Clare Hospital and St. Clare Meadows will discontinue the use and sale of bottled water on June 1st, St. Clare president Sandy Anderson announced today. The two local organizations join more than 20 other members of their parent organization, SSM Health Care, to eliminate bottled water. The system purchases more than half a million bottles of water annually for employees, patients, and guests.

“One of the biggest problems with bottled water is that it takes fossil fuels to produce the bottles,” Anderson said. “And then more fossil fuels are used to transport the bottles to their final destination.”

In 2007, Americans drank more than 8.8 billion gallons of water from plastic water bottles and threw away more than 22 billion. The production of more than 70 million bottles a day drains 1.5 million barrels of oil each year.

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