The Branding of Tap Water

World Water day, March 22, was established in 1992 by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. It was intended to raise awareness that this precious, rapidly shrinking resource must be protected and preserved.

So how is it that bottled water companies are allowed to buy water permits on the cheap, drain our aquifers, and reap tremendous profits by selling our water back to us?

Simple. They’ve built a powerful brand. Their aquaprop has been so successful that Americans consume about four billion gallons of bottled water annually. Production of the bottles manufactured to contain this water consumes about 17 million barrels of oil per year. And the bulk of the bottles, roughly 80 percent, wind up in landfills. Also, in the U.S., tap water is more strictly monitored and regulated than bottled water.

The bottled water industry banks on common misconceptions about the quality of the water they sell versus the quality of the water that flows, far more cheaply, through our taps.

Dasani and Aquafina and the like is not plumbed from pristine mountain springs and spirited into containers by angelic water nymphs. It’s mostly just regular old tap water.

Or, as Eric Yaverbaum, co-founder of Tappening--an organization that attempts to “unsell” bottled water by touting the benefits of tap water--puts it, “The public buys cascading waterfalls on labels that is not what they’re getting. I take incredible issue with a company like Coca-Cola, which sells Dasani. Why can’t they put the source of the water on their label? If you call up Coca-Cola, they’ll tell you, ‘Of course the source is municipal tap water. Everyone knows that.’ Everyone does not know that.”

So what can be done to wean people from their bottled water habit?

The guys at Tappening have an idea: Why not build a brand for U.S. tap water? After all, it’s low-cost, safe and sustainable.

In the year and a half since Tappening launched, the organization has sold 400,000 reusable BPF-free bottles promoting their pro-tap message. They say they want to make tap water cool. The kind of cool they’re touting is up against the old-school disposable-accessory “cool” of bottled water. Tappening’s notion is that tap water is new-school cool--reusable and sustainable.

Tappening’s newest campaign, Greed, encourages site visitors to vote on whether the duo is “greedy entrepreneurs,” “selfless environmentalists” or “both.” Says Yaverbaum, “While educating the public and doing good for the environment, we’re certainly not going to apologize for making money. We’d actually like to promote Tappening as a business model, and hope many more corporations, large and small, will find doing good for the environment while making money to be an attractive idea.”

-- MJP