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.
Campaign intern and sophomore Lizzie Dewan said the organization's efforts have been successful on the local level. As a result of pressure from organizers, the city of San Francisco cut its own bottled water contracts in June, according to MSNBC.
"Bottled water is one of those issues that's related to the 'think global, act local' attitude," she said. "It's one personal action that you can take, that if every person took it, it would have a huge impact on water scarcity worldwide."
"We came to Tufts because there is such a strong environmental initiative here," said Gary, who has been tabling, pitching the campaign in front of various classes and following up with phone calls to help recruit students since the start of school. "We're starting this campaign from the ground up; we're starting by recruiting Tufts students."
The campaign has recruited 15 interns to help organize students and expects to have 30 or more volunteers after holding its kick-off meeting tonight, which will take place at 8:00 p.m. in Anderson 212. ECO has also taken up bottled water as one of its causes, and some of its members will be working to aid the campaign.
Sophomore Matt Horder, one of the 15 interns in charge of recruitment, said the campaign is looking for students with all levels of interest.
"We're looking for people to do one or two hours per month, and we're looking for people to do internships like me, which is about 100 hours per semester," he said. "Anyone can get involved."
Once they have recruited volunteers and interns, Gary said, they will begin reaching out to local environmental, social justice and religious organizations for support, with the goal of creating a coalition of 50 organizations to pressure the city. The campaign will then hold a large public event to gain the attention of regional media.
Their hope is that a combination of pressure from the public and from local organizations will convince Menino to cut Boston's contracts with Nestle.
"It can only help Menino if he signs on, and he can stand up and say, 'We have some of the best tap water in the country," Horder said. "That's great for him. He's saving the taxpayers money, and he's promoting the city."
"He doesn't owe the water companies anything, and he doesn't need them," Horder added.
Director of Tufts' Office of Sustainability Sarah Hammond Creighton said she supports the idea of moving away from bottled water, though she doesn't know enough about the Think Outside the Bottle Campaign to speak to its factual accuracy.
"Buying water in bottles, trucking it around, is a crazy use of resources both in terms of financial resources and environmental resources," she said. "Our tap water in most places in this country is drinkable ... In fact, by regulation, municipal water has a higher standard for a number of things in it than bottle water."
But Gary said the issue comes down to more than just the quality of the water; she said it's a philosophical question about who owns shared natural resources.
"The idea is, as a society, we need to be asking ourselves, 'Is water a commodity that should be bought and sold for profit?" she said. "Or is it a basic fundamental human right that should be protected and promoted?'"
"The idea of corporate control of water is particularly scary in a time of such water scarcity," she added.
