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“The bottled-water industry isn’t just seizing an opportunity — it is banking on the decline of our water infrastructure as key to their successful business model” according to an editorial by Patti Lynn. Lynn further quotes Nestlé Waters North America CEO Kim Jeffery as saying “We believe the tap infrastructure in the U.S. will continue to decline. People will turn to filtration and bottled water for pure-water needs.”
Is this the handwriting on the wall? I’m sure that the CEO of Nestle is a smart business person, and I’m afraid this might be a pretty safe bet in spite of the recent decline in bottled water consumption reported earlier this year. Clearly, there is a lot more work for Back2Tap and other organizations like ours to do. We will all need to do more than raise awareness and convert people to tap – we will also have to convince people to actively lobby for watershed protection and improvements to their water infrastructure.
Last month I got up early and drove into the heart of the Great Swamp watershed, near George Washington’s historic Jockey Hollow encampment in New Jersey to give a breakfast talk to the Great Swamp Watershed Association. I enjoyed doing this because it reminds me why I am working so hard to spread the Back2Tap message. For me, the Back2Tap movement is not only about reducing the waste associated with bottled water– it is also about reconnecting people with the land around them, their watershed.
What does bottled water have to do with the health of your watershed? Everything! If you drink bottled water, then you don’t have to give thought to the quality of your tap water, and then you won’t necessarily care about where it comes from – your watershed. People who rely on tap water are interested in knowing about its source and about how to protect it for the sake of their health and their pocketbooks.
So drinking tap water connects you to your watershed in a very personal way. Watershed stewardship becomes a cause you need to support. This could entail supporting preservation of open space, limiting the application of fertilizer and pesticides that run off into local water bodies, stabilizing slopes so that erosion doesn’t wash silt into water bodies, and supporting your local watershed association.
Conversely, bottled water disconnects you from your local environment. Extracting large quantities of water from remote watersheds to meet the bottled water demand around the United States is a recipe for local disasters. Spring water, usually from small rural locales, is often extracted at unsustainable rates. This lowers water levels in nearby wells and water bodies. Not to mention the nuisance of having water tanker trucks rumble through these small towns 24-7. Make no mistake, collecting and bottling water in one watershed and transporting it to another is hugely wasteful and inefficient compared to filling up at the tap.
Many people ask me “what exit?” when they find out I am from New Jersey. I am lucky to live in Chatham at the edge of the Great Swamp, just 25 miles west of Manhattan. Supplying drinking water for over 2 million people, this watershed is over 55 square miles and includes parts of ten towns. Way back, swamps like this one were viewed as wasted space so they were often utilized as dump sites for municipal and industrial waste. In 1960 the Port Authority of NY and NJ proposed filling it in and making it into the fourth regional airport in the New York metropolitan area. Luckily, people spoke up to save the swamp and the surrounding towns from this devastation. Over 7500 acres have been preserved, mostly in a Federal Wildlife Refuge where over 1000 species (26 endangered) are protected. The Great Swamp Watershed Association works to preserve more land and to raise awareness about the importance of caring for this valuable natural habitat and drinking water source.
Needless to say, I came away from my breakfast meeting at the Great Swamp Watershed Association reminded of the real value our Back2Tap movement offers – raising awareness about our drinking water choices and how that choice affects the health of our watershed, other people’s watersheds and indeed our entire planet.
- A soccer player with one of our bottles
Did you know that Americans each drank an average of 218 bottles of water in 2007? bottles – 66 billion, in fact! Only 23% of them are recycled so on a daily basis, a staggering 140 million disposable plastic bottles go to landfills in the USA. That’s enough, laid end to end, to reach from New Jersey to China and back every day.
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- A soccer player with one of our bottles
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- bottled water bottles laid end to end from Xhina to the US
It doesn’t take an engineering degree to understand that this is a problem. It is extremely wasteful. To begin with, finite natural resources like water and oil are being consumed in the manufacturing of bottled water. It takes 4 ounces of oil and 51 ounces of water to make one 17 ounce bottle of water! Then after their use, 50 billion disposable plastic water bottles are dumped in landfills each year where they will take over 700 years to decompose.
There is a simple solution to this problem. Drink tap water instead of bottled water and use a reusable bottle when you are on-the-go. Even if you filter and flavor your tap water, you will save money because bottled water is 1000 times more expensive than tap water. There are many reusable bottles on the market today. For a high performance, high quality water bottle, try a stainless steel bottle from Back2Tap.
When the Patriots Path Council called to invite Back2Tap to their Jamboree celebrating 100 years of Boy Scouts, I didn’t really know what to expect. Preparing for the “jambo,” I began to wonder whether any boys would visit a table presenting the evils of bottled water when they could be spear throwing, mountain boarding, bullwhip cracking, or watching an army tank run over a car.
In spite of having about 175 cool activities to choose from, a couple hundred of the 4300 scouts and leaders did find time to spend at the Back2Tap table this past Saturday. Every single boy and leader listened intently, asked questions, and seemed genuinely excited about our campaign for getting back to drinking tap water and using reusable bottles. This was definitely the best crowd I’ve ever worked with as an exhibitor. I also learned a lot – from the challenges of having private well water to the best type of carabiner.
Interestingly, even these outdoorsy community-minded folks who had reusable bottles clipped to their belts weren’t familiar with the astounding facts about bottled water waste. Many of them told us that if people knew about the:
• 140 million disposable bottles going to landfills everyday,
• 700 years it takes for plastic to decompose,
• 4 ounces of oil it takes to make each disposable bottle,
• 1000 times greater cost of bottled water, and
• more stringent regulatory oversight of tap water compared to bottled water,
they would be persuaded to drink tap water from reusable bottles instead of bottled water. Most people just don’t know about the hidden costs of their consumer choices. To illustrate these impacts, we had a sequencing activity where scouts put the 18 steps in the Life Cycle of a Disposable Plastic Water Bottle in order (see photo). Impacts on the environment were obvious at many steps in the Life Cycle. Before leaving, they were also able to take our Bottled Water IQ Test to see how much they had learned.
Obviously, there is a lot more work to do getting these facts and concepts out to people. Most of the scouts and scout leaders left our exhibit table eager to spread the Back2Tap message with the rest of their troop and with their communities. This is exactly the type of help the Back2Tap movement needs because it is not a message that large multi-national corporations with large advertising budgets is going to sponsor. It will take community leaders like scouts, teachers, PTO members, municipal volunteers, and green activists spreading the word, community by community. To find out how to help foster the Back2Tap movement, visit our community page.
Congratulations to the Patriots Path Council and the participating scout troops for organizing such an exciting and inspiring event. It was an honor to meet and talk with so many of you – thank you for sharing your opinions and suggestions with Back2Tap.
OK, I haven’t seen the movie “The Age of Stupid” yet, and from the looks of it, it won’t be easy to find it in a theatre nearby for quite a while, if ever. There are so many interesting eco-films out there that never come to a theatre near me. What’s up with that? In this day and age, it seems downright ridiculous and wrong to drive 45 minutes on a highway to see a movie, especially a green flick!
I’ve read three reviews of this movie so far this week: one says it’s overboard gloomy, one says it’s a wake up call, and one reports that it has already inspired a huge greenhouse gas reduction campaign in Great Britain called 10:10 (reduce emissions by 10% by 2010 – that would be in a few months!).
As a co-founder of Back2Tap, I figure I’ve got to see “The Age of Stupid” because it rails on people who think they are green simply because they recycle their disposable plastic bottles. The movie makes the point that it isn’t going to be as simple as recycling more or buying organic. We’re going to have to “reinvent” the way we live in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Thankfully, there is one lifestyle change we can all make without much effort – the way we drink water and use disposable plastic bottles. Tap water takes 800 times less energy to deliver than bottled water according to “The Age of Stupid.” We can all drink tap water from reusable bottles instead of bottled water and significantly reduce our waste of resources and carbon footprint. That is the primary message Back2Tap shares with schools, groups, and anyone who will listen. Join our Reusolution!
Here is a win-win: invest in green jobs and upgrade our water infrastructure (the water lines and treatment facilities). Looking For a Green Job? Grab Your Rain Boots explains that about $6 billion of the stimulus package money is targeted for water projects. This is good for the economy in the short term because it will employ people and good for our pocketbooks in the long run because it will keep the cost of our drinking water down. The alternative, bottled water, costs as much as 1000 times more than tap water! Americans spent $66 billion on bottled water in 2007. This prudent investment in local water-related projects is urgently needed to maintain the quality of our tap water.
Can you imagine a day when we have to buy bottled water because our water lines are too leaky, our water plants are too outdated to provide clean drinking water, and our sewage isn’t treated thoroughly before being discharged to our rivers, lakes, and oceans? We’re going to end up there if we don’t invest this money and even more in our water infrastructure. Look what happened in New Orleans when they didn’t upgrade the levees that engineers said were inadequate? Global warming was not the primary cause of the Katrina catastrophe; lack of investment to upgrade the levees allowed them to be breached and the city to be flooded so badly. It was a man-made disaster. Let’s listen to what the engineers are saying about our water systems!
In the long run, these water-related projects will be a lot cheaper and less wasteful than relying on bottled water for our drinking water needs. These are green jobs we’ll be drinking to in the future!
Many consumers feel that the price of bottled water is worth the convenience that the bottles provide. The fact of the matter is that the price of a single 18 ounce bottle of water is enough to buy 100 gallons of tap water. That takes care of the price factor. In an effort to counteract the convenience factor of bottled water, Back2Tap offers customizable and reusable stainless steel water bottles. With the price and convenience factors of bottled water now in perspective, you do the math… Is bottled water really as convenient as it used to seem?
Oil consumption is one of the main concerns of the environmental “Green” movement. It is a valuable and finite natural resource. Over the course of one year, 17 million barrels of oil are wasted in the production of plastic water bottles. That same amount of oil could be used for much more necessary and productive reasons. For example, the oil used for one year of water bottle production could be used to fuel 1,000,000 cars for that same year. By utilizing Back2Tap’s reusable stainless steel water bottles, we can do our part to help conserve our oil supply for future generations.
The consumption of oil releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into Earth’s atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Power plants, cars, buildings, and factories release immense amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Driving a hybrid vehicle in one way to reduce both fuel consumption and harmful emissions. Surprisingly, water bottle production plants produce and release 2.5 million tons of unnecessary carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere every year. By using reusable stainless steel water bottles from Back2Tap, we can do our part to reduce the rate of global warming. These stainless steel water bottles serve the same environmental purpose as hybrid vehicles. They help to reduce the amount of oil consumed and the amount of harmful emissions released into the atmosphere.
It is commonly believed that most disposable plastic water bottles are recycled and reused. In fact, close to 80% of used water bottles end up in the trash that piles up in our landfills. By switching from bottled water to tap water, we can help reduce the number of plastic bottles that get tossed into the trash. On average, there are 137 million plastic bottles that get thrown into the trash every day. That is enough, laid end to end to reach China and back.
Back2Tap makes it easier to turn away from bottled water with their stainless steel reusable water bottles. Consider the number of water bottles that you have used in your life until this point. Now consider how many more water bottles you have the potential to use throughout the rest of your life. With the help of a stainless steel reusable water bottle, you can eliminate 100% of your future disposable plastic water bottle usage and do your part in helping rid the environment of the millions of plastic bottles that are dumped in our landfills every day.
Environmentalism is a social movement which strives to preserve our natural resources and influence people to take steps to minimize the damage that we inflict on the Earth every day. Almost every major industry (including automobile, airline, public service, and household product companies) has made changes to their operations in order to function in ways that are more “green”. Even some of the companies that produce bottled water have taken action to have less of an effect on the environment by using less plastic per bottle. However, the strongest impact on the environment does not stem from the corporations, but from the individual.
There are many misconceptions regarding the effects of drinking bottled water as opposed to tap water. Many people believe that it is healthier to drink bottled water than it is to drink tap water. This is not correct. Tap water is highly regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency whereas the production of bottled water is supervised by the Food and Drug Administration and is not subject to the strict regulations that tap water must satisfy. There is also a common false assumption that bottled water comes from mountain springs which makes it better regarding both taste and health, when almost half of the water than gets commercially bottled is simply filtered tap water. Many people prefer bottled water because it is flavored when, in actuality, filtering and flavoring tap water is easy and inexpensive compared to buying bottles of flavored water. Back2Tap’s stainless steel reusable water bottles offer the individual an opportunity to reduce his or her impact on the environment as well as save money by drinking tap water when on the go.
