Representatives from the Think Outside the Bottle (TOTB) campaign joined with city officials, faculty members, journalists and students at a press conference in Sophia Gordon yesterday to proclaim the accomplishments and further goals of the movement, which aims to decrease bottled water use.
Liz Gary, a spokesperson for Corporate Accountability International, the non-profit organization that has helped organize the TOTB campaign, read a statement from Mayor Thomas Menino's office saying that it was looking into the feasibility of cutting its contracts with bottled water companies and making taps the office's official source of drinking water.
TOTB's Boston campaign seeks to raise awareness about the safeness and quality of the city's tap water, and the environmental and economic detriments caused by water-bottle production and disposal.
This effort has taken off on campus, and the Tufts Community Union Senate passed a resolution Sunday asking the administration to spend less money on bottled water at university-sponsored events and promote the use of tap water.
Many people who attended TOTB's press conference yesterday took the "tap water challenge," in which they drank unlabeled samples of tap and bottled water and then had to name which one they thought was bottled water.
"Nobody ever can identify what is from the tap and what is from the bottle," TOTB intern and student leader Ben Gabin, a senior, told the Daily. "There really is no way to tell the difference in terms of taste."
Jeanne Richardson, a spokesperson for the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, spoke in favor of the city's tap water at the event. She said that she is thrilled by the TOTB campaign's push to get more people to use the tap.
But the bottled water industry would contend that tap water cannot stand up to its product in terms of quality and convenience.
"Purified water is much more than just tap water," said Tracey Halliday, a spokesperson for the American Beverage Association, a group representing the non-alcoholic beverage industry. "It's put through a rigorous purification process [that] creates great-tasting water. We think that people should have the choice.
"The convenience of the bottled water allows people to stay hydrated throughout the day, no matter where they're going," she added.
According to statistics provided by TOTB, at least four billion pounds of plastic bottles were thrown in city waste dumps across the country last year. It costs the government more than $70 million per year to dispose of water bottles and it took 17 million barrels of oil to provide the energy needed to create water bottles last year.
Halliday said that American bottled water companies have been taking steps to address the environmental problems that their industry causes. "We are ... light-weighting our packaging, which simply means that we are reducing the weight of our containers," she said. "Our member companies have been using less and less packaging. It's been an ongoing process."
