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November 3, 2007
Bottled water’s environmental backlash
By Sandy Bauers
Bottled water, once an icon of a healthy lifestyle, has become a pariah, the environmentally incorrect humvee of beverages.
In recent months, dissent over the once innocuous bottle of Aquafina or Dasani has grown from a trickle to a tsunami.
Not just among enviros who decry the 1.5 million barrels [Correction: 15 million barrels] of oil used to make a year's worth of bottles. (Plus more to transport it from, in the case of Tasmanian Rain, the end of the earth.)
Not just among pragmatists who cringe at the absurdity of paying $1.50 for bottled when tap is all but free - a fraction of a cent per gallon in Philadelphia.
Dreamalee Brotz, a special-education teacher at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, only had to look at her family's water bottles piling up in the recycling bin to reconsider what on earth she was doing.
She bought a refillable Nalgene bottle - the new icon of a healthy and an environmentally correct lifestyle.
"I feel better about myself, and I'm saving money."
Throughout the region, tap water is getting a boost from college events and eco-campaigns. At least one restaurant is about to banish bottled water, even as another celebrates it with 42 selections.
Bottled water - a $10.9 billion-a-year industry in the United States - has even emerged as a moral issue, a peace issue.
"We are called by our faith stance," said Sister Sharon Dillon, a former executive director of the Franciscan Federation in Washington, as she pledged to forgo Deer Park, Poland Spring, and all the others.
For her, it's a matter of equitable access. A billion people worldwide don't have safe drinking water, one in five of them children.
Americans, on the other hand, with near total access, are binging on bottled of every sort, from the handheld variety to the office jugs. We swigged 8.25 billion gallons in 2006 - an average of 28 gallons per person.
Dillon spoke at a teleconference organized by the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International, which sees bottled water as a corporate abuse - the takeover of a natural resource that should belong to everyone.
The group wants people to "Think Outside the Bottle" and, like Dillon, pledge not to drink it.
Canada's Polaris Group, which advocates for social change, wants people to take a closer look at what's inside the bottle. According to the Beverage Marketing Corp., more than 40 percent is filtered or treated tap water.
Last month, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation requiring water labels to specify the source, beginning in 2009.
The Women's International League of Peace and Freedom has launched a three-year "Save the Water" campaign, on the notion that drinking bottled water encourages privatization, which can lead to wars over water.
The league's local chapter hopes to prompt a boycott here by spreading the word at schools and at plastic-unfriendly places such as Weaver's Way Co-op in Mount Airy - which sells corn-resin bottles that can be refilled up to 90 times.
"It's a scam the way they've made it fashionable to drink bottled water at every meeting, every event," league member Dory Loder said.
In the spring, Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer-rights organization, released a numbers-laden report, Take Back the Tap, aiming to show why tap water "is better for your health, your pocketbook and the environment."
Taking advantage of the hoopla, American Water Works has launched an ad campaign to plug the value of public water systems nationwide, which require $300 billion just to maintain the pipes - 3,000 miles of them in Philadelphia.
The ad pictures a faucet that asks, however improbably, "Do you know how often you turn me on?" Listing myriad other tasks - from laundering to fighting fires - the ad asserts that "only tap water delivers."
The bottled-water industry doesn't see the debate as either-or. Bottled is just often more convenient, said Joe Doss, president of the International Bottled Water Association. Its surveys indicate that 75 percent of people who drink bottled also drink tap.
Doss said campaigns against bottled water could result in less water overall going down the national gullet, a health issue.
He said that the plastic in bottles had gone down 40 percent in five years, and that while some bottles wound up in landfills, they were only a minuscule proportion.
Still, momentum grows.
Officials at Smith College in Massachusetts handed out 2,500 refillable bottles and installed an eight-headed tap in the dining hall for what students now call "draft" water.
On Friday at a University of Pennsylvania "Green Fest," the campus enviro group held a tap-water challenge - part taste test, part educational opportunity.
"You don't have to do any convincing," said Anil Venkatesh, a math major who guzzles West Philly tap water. "Most people are like, 'Wow, thanks for telling me.' "
Public officials are acting.
In June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors decided to study the impact of bottled water on city waste streams.
Apparently, it's bottles, bottles, everywhere. The Container Recycling Institute says 86 percent of water bottles - maybe two million tons of plastic a year - wind up as litter or in landfills instead of recycling bins.
Partly because of the glut, states are implementing bottle bills that require deposits on even recyclable plastic. Sen. John Rafferty (R., Montgomery) introduced a bill in Pennsylvania in the summer.
San Francisco and perhaps a dozen other cities - not Philadelphia, which spent $92,000 in fiscal 2007 for jug water and cooler rental - have canceled purchasing contracts.
Bottled water "very clearly reflects the wasteful and reckless consumerism in this country," Salt Lake City Mayor Ross C. Anderson said.
Chicago is mulling a tax. New York launched an ad campaign. Louisville, Ky., adopted a mascot - Tapper.
So far, none of this has affected Philadelphia's Water Works restaurant, the nation's largest water bar, owner Michael Karloutsos said.
Its 42 brands come from Norway, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, Fiji. It is well water, springwater, rainwater, and the melt of glaciers.
The most pricey: Bling H2O, $50. "More than a pretty taste," says the manufacturer, it comes from a Tennessee spring, and the bottle is studded with Swarovski crystals.
Water is dubbed the new wine in culinary circles, and each has a distinct flavor, a specific food it complements, Karloutsos said.
He opts out of the debate, saying he's not an eco-expert. While he also offers tap - "Schuylkill Punch" - nearly eight of 10 customers ask for bottled. Plus, "you don't have to take anybody's keys when he drinks two bottles of water."
Oddly enough, his restaurant sits atop the Fairmount Water Works, a birthplace of Philadelphia tap water.
Now it is an interpretive center, with exhibits including 20-foot "waterfall" made of disposable plastic water bottles - artist Deb Hoy's monument to "the consumerist remnants" of the phenomenon.
Philadelphia public water has a bit of an image problem - 20 percent of Philadelphian's still refuse to drink it. Never mind that, in at least 10 years, the Water Department has had no health-based violations. Or that Philadelphia's water ranked 12th among 93 cities in a Conference of Mayors taste test.
So the department bottles some, labels it "phillytap," and distributes it at the center and community events.
Across town, the White Dog Cafe has been serving Saratoga water from a family-owned company in New York.
Still, restaurant owner Judy Wicks felt guilty. She bought carafes and a machine to chill and filter tap water. But it was too slow.
Last week, Wicks resolved anew. Once the White Dog's stash of Saratoga runs out - a month? - it will be all tap, all the time.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20071103_Bottled_waters_environmental_backlash.html
This article was also printed by the Seattle Times as "The newest public enemy: bottled water" (http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=water12&date=20071112)
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