Okay, let’s be realistic. Not everyone is willing to give up the convenience of bottled water. If I forget to take water with me or am overcome with sudden thirst, I sometimes give in and buy it myself.
And, not everyone takes the health concerns seriously or thinks their contribution of plastic amounts to much in the grander scheme of things.
You Can Lead a Horse to Water
Instead of trying to drag consumers kicking and screaming toward more earth-friendly practices, what if we came up with other solutions that make it easy for even the least health- or environmentally-conscious among us to drink more responsibly? Like Craig Zucker did.
Zucker came up with Tap’D NY: filtered, local tap water from New York, sold in New York. Since most bottled water is just unfiltered tap water anyway, and a number of brands are shipped half way around the world for North American consumption, it makes more than a whole lot of sense.
I love the idea.
- It’s just plain truthful. Forget the water, this alone is refreshing
- It’s cleaner than regular bottled water
- It racks up fewer frequent flyer miles
- You don’t have to use a drinking fountain in NYC that you aren’t sure is clean
- New Yorkers can stop feeling like idiots for buying water from a tap in Fiji that arrived on a freighter
So here’s a crazy idea: What if our city partnered with a truly local bottling company to create a profitable business that pumped money back into the municipal budget for things like upgrades to our water infrastructure? Wow, that’d be a novel, forward-thinking idea, wouldn’t it?
Related post: