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$12 billion per year go into the bottled water industry, which capitalizes on a basic human need in the U.S., including Maine, according to Amy Dowley, a spokesperson for Food and Water Watch, a non-profit Washington D.C.-based lobbying organization.
In Maine, local bottled water companies don’t pay for the water they profit from, and do not provide jobs to local people or support the local economy, according to Jim Wilfong, an adjunct with the University of Southern Maine.
Take Back the Tap has visited college campuses to create awareness and educate the next generation on the untapped resource of local water. Locally it has visited the University of Maine campuses in Southern Maine and Orono, and Colby College. Its campaign aims to eliminate bottled water on college campuses and create awareness for supporting tap water infrastructure in local communities.
Take Back the Tap is a growing organization supported by Food and Water Watch. The group consists of water activists who believe providing food and water to all citizens should be the main priority for government infrastructure.
Food and Water Watch aims to educate the public on using their tap water as a resource, rather than spending hundreds of dollars on bottled water each year.
There are approximately 20 to 30 people working on the project. Their goal is to ensure community water resources provide for people, not for companies desiring commercializing of natural water.
Although people are taught to think they should drink bottled water and somehow their tap water is not healthy or safe to drink, tap water is tested by local governments several hundred times a week, Dowley said.
The water industry uses 17 million gallons of oil each year to make its bottles, while people all over the world do not have access to sufficient drinking water, Dowley said.
At bottled water companies, regulations require that they test their water once a week before bottling, Dowley said.
The money spent on bottled water could help create cleaner water for everyone in the country by funding resources and services to promote local drinking programs, according to Dowley. Having more filter systems and reducing ground water depletion could, along with the reduction in bottled costs and waste, allow more money, time and research to be spent on providing clean tap water to people around the country and the world, according to Dowley.
“We have to concentrate on reducing the waste. The waste stream is only getting larger and larger,” Wilfong said.
Take Back the Tap envisions awareness of the safety of local drinking water. It uses free, public resources, and hopes boycotting bottled water will force more money and resources to be spent on the current U.S. water infrastructure.
During the Take Back the Tap talk on Dec. 4, a water taste test was conducted. The results showed there was no difference of preference between, the University of Maine campus tap water, and the brands Dasani and Poland Spring.
“I think this should go national and it is a really cool thing you are doing,” said UMaine fourth-year English student Adrian Wingard. “That was a great lecture for sure. I want to do more research on this, for it is a very real threat to Maine’s water tables, especially rural towns where a great bulk of it is farmed out to Dasani or Poland Springs.”
Bangor Daily News