DAM THE BOTTLED WATER! What is wrong with North Americans and Europeans that we don’t drink our safe, available and free tap water? Instead we support a huge infrastructure built up over the past 150 years which sells bottled water in plastic and glass, producing litter and exorbitant environmental costs for the production and disposal of all the containers. People are not deciding not to drink tap water but are deciding to drink purchased bottled water for its convenience, its chi chi, and perhaps because advertising is suggesting our tap water is not good. Hog wash. If you don’t like the taste of your safe tap water, add a filter to your spigot or buy a Brita. We are paying huge sums of money for bottled water when our tap water is clean, abundant, safe, available and free. It is counterproductive to what we are trying to accomplish in making safe drinking water available to the over one billion peoples of this world who don’t have it. We are sending the wrong message by drinking bottled water when we have safe tap water.

The answer is NOT to produce and deliver bottled water. The answer is what Blue Planet’s Peer Water Exchange program is doing – providing people with the financial backing and resources (eg. awareness, education, technicians, grants) to construct sustainable systems that will bring safe drinking water to their villages and towns for life, such as rainwater harvesting, boring holes, wells and filtration and piping systems.

The Blue Planet Run team has been forced by circumstances to buy bottled water in plastic containers because in many of the areas we are traveling through tap water is not an option, and/or because we cannot trust the water or have limited access to it. We will be filtering water where we can. But, being on the road as we are, we are often relegated to buying bottled water and then having no means to recycle the containers. This contradicts our principle of leave no trace. We have succumbed because water is life, and water is essential to our success on this around the world run.

Now I learn that in my hometown, Montpelier, Vermont, a landowner plans to take our spring on North Street and bottle the water, creating the East Montpelier Bottling Company for the manufacture for sale of gallons of bottled water in plastic containers. This spring was a safe and tasty source of drinking water for many Montpelier residents for years before our municipal water system produced good water. Not only is the plan philosophically irresponsible, it will permit this landowner to draw from our valuable and limited groundwater aquifers. Vermont still has no law which regulates and protects our groundwater. If you are reading this and live in Vermont, please contact the Vermont Natural Resources Council and your legislator and voice your opposition now.

We must study what motivates the trend to pay for bottled water and reverse the thinking of those who spend billions of dollars a year on the production of it. We must focus our financial and political energy on the water issue to utilization of water as a necessary natural resource and not a commodity to get rich on. We must make this natural resource safe and available to all the peoples of the world so that the deaths resulting from the lack of access to safe drinking water and from waterborne diseases are curtailed and eventually no longer occur. We must encourage and support those countries without safe drinking water to create sustainable water sources such as through the Blue Planet Run Foundation’s Peer Water Exchange. We can only do this credibly if we who have access to safe drinking water start drinking it from our taps. So I say, put the plug on bottled water and dam up the sources.

Special thanks to Chris Ortloff and Virginia Farley for their part in this debate piece.