Tufts Daily

Issue date: 9/18/07 Section: Features

Media Credit: Danai Macridi/Tufts Daily Organizers for Think Outside the Bottle estimate that 40 percent of bottled water comes from municipal tap water. They're working to convince the city of Boston to axe its bottled water contracts for municipal offices and events.

Cool, sleek and refreshingly sterile, the water bottle touches your lips on a hot day. You open your throat, and a stream of ice-cold liquid flows into your greedy stomach, conjuring images of a clean, peaceful mountain spring or an arctic glacier.

But according to the Tufts organizers for Think Outside the Bottle, an environmental campaign dedicated to promoting public water sources, it's more appropriate for you to envision sink faucet than a mountain reservoir.

Think Outside the Bottle estimates that 40 percent of all bottled water comes from municipal taps. This is one reason of many for the group's campaign to convince Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to cut the city's water contracts with Nestle's Ice Mountain brand and publicly proclaim the quality and value of Boston's municipal water system.

According to the organization, the city spends about $100,000 each year on bottled water for its offices and events.

Recently, pressure from Think Outside the Bottle led Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo, Inc. to announce that their top bottled water brands, Dasani and Aquafina, were made from tap water rather than the natural spring sources that their marketing campaigns implied.

Elizabeth Gary, the campaign's Boston organizer, said bottled water is both wasteful and exploitative, as large companies control scarce water sources and sell the water back to people for a profit. She said water should be a "fundamental human right" rather than a commodity.

"Corporations spend millions of dollars every year conditioning us - especially young people - that the only place to get clean, safe water is from a bottle," she said. "Where are we to look for messages that say bottled tap water is better regulated, tested more frequently and held to higher standards if not our local governments, who should be providing us with access to public water?"

The campaign is run by the nonprofit organization Corporate Accountability International, a group that became famous for exposing Nestle's aggressive marketing of baby formula to poor countries in the 1970s. The company is now organizing a group of interns and volunteers at Tufts - and at colleges in seven other cities across America - to influence local politicians and businesses to change their policies on bottled water.

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