September 15th, 2008 · No Comments

By Harriet Blake

Drinking tap, not bottled, water is gaining momentum in restaurants from coast to coast. The “Take Back the Tap” campaign began in March in San Francisco, although some restaurants had already been forgoing bottled water on their own. It grew to include cities such as Alburquerque, Memphis, Omaha, Portland, Seattle and San Diego, and this past summer, the Big Apple.

The program is sponsored by Food and Water Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit consumer rights organization that looks at corporate control and abuse of the country’s food and water resources. The New York Take Back the Tap campaign also is sponsored by Riverkeeper, a Hudson River environmental protection group.

“Our goal is to make sure that people have safe and affordable drinking water,” says Food and Water Watch (FWW) executive director Wenonah Hauter. “Food and Water Watch promotes a clean water trust fund that protects [the country's] 1.5 million miles of water structure.”

“The good news is that our public utilities do a good job of providing clean water, but with aging pipes, we need to maintain that infrastructure,” she says.

“The problem with bottled water,” she says “is that it’s unregulated…It gets tested maybe once a week, and once it’s bottled, there is no testing.”

“Tap water, on the other hand, is highly regulated by the EPA. It gets tested 300 to 400 times a month. Public utilities have to test their water. With bottled water, you don’t know what you’re getting.”

Not to mention that using tap water could prevent billions of plastic water bottles from piling up in landfills. Americans alone use an estimated 70 million disposable plastic water bottles every day, according to a report by the Container Recycling Institute.

Craig Stoll, who owns Delfina restaurant in San Francisco, says, “We stopped serving bottle water for the past couple of years. We never get any negative comments. Customers are totally on board with it.” Stoll says he grew up drinking the tap water in New York City. He found similar good-tasting water when he moved to San Francisco.

Even though there’s a loss of revenue when a restaurant stops selling bottled water and purchases a carbonator so they can serve bubbly water, it’s still worth it because it’s the right thing to do, Stoll said.

In New York City, Joe Bastianich, co-owner of Del Posto, says, “To spend fossil fuel trucking water around the world is absurd. Water should be as local as anything gets. That’s why we’re taking the lead on this, and encouraging other New York City restaurants to do the same.”

“Our Take Back the Tap program helps educate people about this through restaurants,” Hauter says. Food and Water Watch also promotes the program on college campuses. In some cases, students are helping break their school’s contract with bottled water companies.

Some smaller and medium-sized cities where the program is active include Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, and Madison, Wisc., home to the University of Wisconsin. (Northhampton, Mass., and Portland, Maine.)

Recently, Food and Water Watch provided the water for the Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco (see picture above by FWW) where 60,000 participants drank water without bottles. Instead, says Hauter, they brought their own refillable bottles, used FWW’s steel bottles or used biodegradeable plastic cups from the utility companies.

Big corporations, says Hauter, “take our water for practically nothing and tell us it’s chic and healthy when they sell it back to us in a pretty bottle for exorbitant prices. New York City tap water is just as safe and healthy as bottle water, and is a far more cost-effective choice.”

James Simpson, staff attorney with New York’s Riverkeeper protection group, agrees. Like Food and Water Watch, Riverkeeper helps educate the public, he says. On Oct. 12, they are hosting Waterfest along the Hudson River side of Manhattan.

“Waterfest will celebrate the Hudson River and New York City’s great tap water,” he said.

NInety percent of New York City’s water comes from water supply system that flows from the Catskills, he explains. The city consumes about 1.2 billion gallons of water a day. The Catskills water system got started in the 1920s and includes two reservoirs and an aqueduct that lies beneath the Hudson. Without today’s technological advances available, workers shoveled through bedrock to create the aqueduct, which Simpson considers a modern-day wonder.

Interestingly, says Simpson, “New York City’s water is not filtered, yet it is safe to drink and tasty. New York City reservoirs are so pure - it’s just the nature of its ecology - that it doesn’t require filtering.”

On the subject of bottled vs tap water, there’s no contest, Simpson says. Tap water is not only cheaper, it’s better for the environment.

Riverkeeper’s mission is to make sure New York City lives up to the Take Back the Tap program. They make sure pollutants don’t get into the reservoirs and they protect the land in and around the Catskills. “By making sure no development occurs, this will protect our watershed - the area of land from which all surface water draws.”

• For information on reducing bottle waste and converting to tap water for your own event or workplace see the FWW guide on “freeing your event” from bottled water.
• If your university campus, city government, or community group wants to break the bottled water habit, leaders can sign theTake Back the Tap pledge or they contact Food & Water Watch.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media