This fountain is in the Carter Lane Gardens, across from St. Paul’ s Cathedral in London, and it’s part of the city’s “Refill on Tap” program (you can read a bit more about the fountain here). Would you fill your bottle here? Do you think the fountain should also have a place to sip water, for the container-less population? (Thanks to Annie Bolitho for the photo.)

The Toronto Star has an article today on public drinking water fountains, in which swab tests of spigots revealed high bacterial counts. It’s not until the story’s 26th paragraph that we learn “Most bacteria are harmless and even beneficial to us but a few species are pathogenic and can cause infectious disease.” Then, farther down, we learn there have been no reported cases of illness from a city fountain. Finally, this: “The Star’s results should not discourage people from drinking at water fountains, says one of Canada’s top environmental microbiologists. … “We will never live, and cannot survive in an environment free of microorganisms,” said Ryerson University’s Gideon Wolfaardt, a Canada Research Chair who supplied the Star with researchers from his laboratory.

My takeaway was this: fountains need scrubbing, frequently. Just because there are bacteria on a spigot doesn’t mean healthy people will get sick from drinking the water.  Don’t swab the spigot with your tongue.

Update: just learned that Food and Water Watch’s Renew America’s Water campaign — which calls on Congress to establish a dedicated source of funding ($30 billion) for water and wastewater infrastructure — also seeks to establish federal grants for schools that want to repair, replace, update or test their drinking water systems.

Renewal

This is a really important question. I don’t know the answer for sure, but microbiologists I’ve asked say it’s unlikely (see my comments and other responses to my post on the ten rotating water stations in New York, from July 6, 2010).

Here’s a photo of a fountain in Bundanoon, Australia, a town where merchants voluntarily quit selling bottled water. If you were a germaphobe, would you drink from this?

And if you wouldn’t, would you refill your bottle from a spigot dedicated to bottle refilling (that is, a spigot from which sipping is impossible)?

Yesterday, New York’s Department of Environmental Protection announced it would be rotating ten portable water fountains around the city this summer, to high-traffic areas like parks, green markets, and special events.  (Here’s a schedule of where the fountains will be, in case you’re planning your day around low-cost, healthful hydration. )

I’m all for fountains, as anyone who’s read my blog, my books, or my other babblings well knows. And I applaud this experiment: who wouldn’t want more places to drink cold, clean water for free? The fountains have spigots for sipping and spigots for refilling bottles and even a spigot for watering pets. Bravo. But why bother placing them in parks, which already have fountains? I’d argue that we need fountains most in our vast deserts of concrete (there will be one in Times Square now and then — that’s a perfect place to leave a fountain in place year-round). And we need exponentially more of them. The DEP’s “water on the go” fountains are hooked up to fire hydrants, which are already fixtures on our streets, plumbed and nearly ready to burble. Why not make the fountains — with a smaller footprint, handicapped accessible, and frost resistant — permanent as well?

I realize the installation and maintenance of fountains costs money, but WotG has many partners, and surely there are many more organizations willing to buy some naming rights to become associated in the public imagination with the city’s greatest natural resource, with health, a generosity of spirit (have a drink!) and a smaller environmental footprint (less bottle waste, fewer water trucks on the road).

I’m thrilled by this advance, don’t get me wrong. But I wonder, also, if these fountains are a pilot project, an experiment to measure how many people will actually drink tap water from a public fountain. The city’s past reluctance to embrace a more widespread fountain program — installing thousands of fountains throughout the boroughs– has long made me wonder: does the mayor know something about our water that we don’t? (Read my book Bottlemania for the straight dope on the city’s water quality report, plus some obscure B sides that go above and beyond. I concluded the water’s fine. Mike Bloomberg: anything else I should know?)

If you’re in the city this summer, I urge you to drink up and get counted. Let the fountains go forth and multiply.

not through force but through persistence.” (Ovid)

I’m reporting this waaay late (no one should expect timeliness from this blog), but there are hints of movement on the pro-fountain front in my neck of the woods.  Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer last month released his FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System report, which includes a section on water (see pg 29).  Stringer’s recommendations include “Increase access to drinking water fountains while reducing the consumption of disposable plastic water bottles in New York City.” His goal is tripartite: Reduce Bottled Water Consumption; Increase the Number of Water Fountains;  Encourage the Sale of Water Canteens.

I couldn’t have said it better, but it remains to be seen if the mayor will adopt and implement Stringer’s recommendations. Same goes with the report, out on February 1, of the New York City Green Codes Task Force, which convened at the request of Mayor Bloomberg and City Council speaker Chistine Quinn to recommend changes to the laws and regulations affecting buildings in New York and identify impediments to green practices. The report inspires all manner of “who knew?” moments. (If doors on stairways were transparent and were left open, do you think more people would use the stairs? It’s certainly worth a try, if we could rejigger the building codes to allow it.)

As a nonarchitect, and someone who’s never had to think about building codes, I found the report thoroughly interesting. Especially (you knew this was coming) the part about water, a short bit that appears on page 23. “Issue: People buy and consume bottled water and sugary drinks, in large part, because there are not enough easily accessible water fountains. All bottled drinks stress the environment by wasting materials, using energy for transportation, and creating waste. Also, sugary drinks can contribute to chronic diseases. Recommendation: Increase the number of required drinking fountains, and also require that they include faucets for filling
bottles. Do not allow bottled water to substitute for fountains.”

This last part is important, because in some places it’s perfectly legal for bottled-water vending machines or kiosks to take the place of water fountains (sports arenas in Ohio and Florida were clobbered in the media for going with vendors rather than fountains).

So yes, these recommendations are just recommendations. Ellen Honigstock, a friendly neighborhood LEED architect who worked on two committees of the Task Force, told me,  “Various city agencies will incorporate items that can be changed without changes to laws, and various city council members will champion other measures to get them through.”

Drinking fountains aren’t hugely expensive, and private companies may be willing to sponsor either their construction or maintenance. It’s in the mid-50s here today: the thirsty season is nearly upon us.

The following stories show a range of bottled-water activism on college campuses.  In Ontario, Ryerson University will ban sales of bottled water by 2013. Why the lag? It takes a long time, apparently, to get new fountains up and running (and to run out vending contracts). Still, it’s a brave move. According to The Eyeopener Online, “The ban will impact the university’s contract with Coca-Cola, which allows the corporation exclusive rights to sell beverages on campus. In return, Ryerson gets $765,000 a year if enough products are sold, with the bulk of the money going to scholarships, bursaries and athletics.”

At Humboldt State, reports The Lumberjack, Captain Reducer, who’d recently seen the anti-bottled water documentary Tapped, stood in the quad and railed against bottled water.  Here’s his picture:

The administration asked him to lower his mic, a student suggested he use more facts.  Everyone’s a critic.

At Wesleyan, students are discussing ways to reduce bottled water use on campus, including the use of a filtered-water dispensing machine. The filtered water would cost half as much as bottled, so campus caterer Bon Appetit would still see some revenue from water. But I wonder about students’ mental calculus: one of the attractions of bottled water is that you don’t have any responsibility toward the bottle. You drink your beverage, and you throw the bottle into the recycling bin. That’s what the industry calls convenience (that, and not having to carry a reusable around with you). How would you feel about paying 50 to 75 cents for a half liter of water and then still having to carry and wash it? All of a sudden, it’s not looking so convenient. So much easier and cheaper to just drink (or refill) from a fountain.

My question: What’s wrong with the tap water at Wesleyan? It makes more sense to me to actually find out (through independent lab testing), and then, if there’s anything to worry about, to install filters in existing fountains and install more of them, the same as other institutions (Google) and schools (Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Winnipeg, etc. etc.)

Anne Rosenthal, ’10, Wesleyan’s Environmental Organizers Network co-coordinator and representative to the dining committee, has it right. From the Wesleyan Argus: “The crux of this campaign is the awareness issue, because when kids get off campus there’s going to be bottled water everywhere,” Rosenthal said. “We just want them to get in the habit of thinking about the impacts of their purchases and getting used to alternatives.”

Ben Firke, ’12, chair of the dining committee, is being cautious: “We want to be good stewards of the earth,” Firke said. “But we also want to make sure that if there’s something that Wesleyan students really become reliant on, we’re not going to deprive them of that for what they would interpret as being arbitrary reasons.”

Arbitrary reasons? Please, listen to Rosenthal’s economic, health, and environmental arguments. And just because we’re reliant on something — coal-burning power plants, slaves, the trade in whale blubber — doesn’t mean we can or ought to stick with it for all time.  What do you think the class of 1980, or ’85 or even ’90 drank when they were thirsty for water?

New York City’s Dept. of Environmental Protection has partnered with Aveda to provide tap water – for free! – during Fashion Week at six fountains around the city. Here’s a picture of one water rig.

I don’t think it’s lovely. But I’m glad if the fountains will depress sales of bottled water and spur New Yorkers and visitors to think about the ubiquity and quality of tap water. The fountains will stay put for a week: how I wish a sponsor would step in to support them permanently. And so long as I’m asking, why not design something more attractive, something that inspires confidence in the output? (Fire hydrants put me in mind of dog urine).
There are plenty of cool designs out there – fountains with dual spigots: one for sipping and one dedicated to hygienically refilling bottles.

Here’s the press release from the DEP:

DEP, Aveda to Promote NYC Tap Water During Fashion Week “NYC Water on the Go” Stations in Manhattan Will Help Reduce Use of Plastic Water Bottles Environmental Protection Commissioner Cas Holloway was joined by Aveda’s Creative Director Antoinette Beenders today to announce a partnership to make New York City tap water (NYC Water) available for free at Manhattan locations throughout Fashion Week. New Yorkers and visitors to the City will be able fill their own reusable bottles with NYC Water from one of six “NYC Water on the Go” stations around the City. The goal of the initiative is to raise awareness about the waste that plastic bottles generate, and engage the fashion community to eliminate it. “New York City tap water is among the highest quality and best tasting in the world,” said Commissioner Holloway. “We are thrilled to work with Aveda, an environmental leader, to remind people that there is a great-tasting alternative to bottled water and the waste it generates — and it comes right out of the tap.” “Aveda is an activist brand at heart, so we are thrilled to partner with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection in being a force of change in helping to raise awareness of water issues,” said Chuck Bennett, vice president of Aveda Earth and Community Care. Working collaboratively to help reduce Fashion Week’s environmental footprint, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will set up “NYC Water on the Go” stations promoting NYC Water as an environmentally friendly alternative to bottled water. The stations will be installed at the following locations: SoHo (Broadway and Prince Street) – In front of Dean & Deluca Union Square (15th Street) – In front of Staples Chelsea (19th Street 5th Avenue) – In front of Aveda Store Herald Square (6th Avenue and 36th Street) – In front of Manhattan Mall Times Square (Broadway and 47th Street) – In front of Starbucks Rockefeller Center (5th Avenue and 49th Street) View an online map of these NYC Water locations.

Lots of bottled-water market news lately.

In Canada, the Polaris Institute is celebrating the “beginning of the end of bottled water” with a roundup of municipalities and school districts that have quit selling or supplying bottled water (read the article here). Joe Cressy, the author, believes the tide has turned, but notes “bottled water companies are not going to simply stop producing bottled water. Let’s be honest, there is a lot of money to be made from selling tap water back to residents in plastic bottles. In the face of today’s backlash, bottled water companies have increased their advertising and lobbying activities. Nestlé, for example, continues to offer municipalities money for recycling projects on the condition that they rescind their bottled water restrictions. The City of Thorold, Ontario just recently rejected a $90,000 offer from Nestlé to rescind their bottled water ban.”

Meanwhile, the Canadian water brand Naya, which had all but disappeared in the United States, is now “planning aggressive domestic expansion”  in bottles made of 100 percent recycled plastic,  the first of their kind for water, Brandweek reports.  Granted, Naya is a tiny brand and doesn’t need a vast and constant stream of recycled PET, but one can only hope this increases the pressure on Nestle, Coke and Pepsi (if they’re going to continue selling water in disposable bottles, that is) to follow suit. After all, Americans discard 30 to 40 billion plastic water bottles every year.

Over in the U.K., rumors of the demise of the bottled water industry appear to be premature.  Between 2006 and 2008, volume sales of water in the UK fell 11 percent, reports Grocery Trader, but in 2009, sales were down a mere 1 percent. “With economic conditions expected to improve, Mintel forecasts that volume sales will start growing steadily from 2011 onwards and that by 2014 the British will once again be consuming 2.5 billion litres a year.”

Yesterday, Matthew Savage at Triple Pundit wrote a piece on the slowdown in bottled-water sales and the rise in the use of re-usable bottles, noting “But the bottled water industry is enormous, estimated at about $16 billion, and reusable water bottles are a mere drop in the bucket. It would take a mass exodus of people using refillable water bottles to take away the significant market share of the bottled water industry.”

Savage ends by asking, “Reusable water bottles are a great step in the right direction, but how can bottled water companies fundamentally rethink their business models?” Unless “rethink their business model” means quit selling bottled water, I don’t think there’s a lot they can do to satisfy people who are fundamentally against the growth of bottled water. Yes, more people need to use refillable bottles, and we need more places to refill them, and we need guarantees that public water supplies are safe (or filtered). But do we really want companies interested in increasing their sales of bottled water — companies that answer to shareholders, not the public– to move into these areas?

The Times, as part of its ongoing water series, had a devastating front-page feature on Clean Water Act violations and contaminated drinking water yesterday. Read it for yourself; it’s chock full of slams against the EPA for lax regulation and utility managers for under-reporting violations, looking the other way, and slapping hands that should have been chopped off.  (Read the comments too – there are many gems among the more than 400.)

A couple thoughts: Just because industry violates the Clean Water Act with unlawful dumping doesn’t mean a utility isn’t cleaning up the drinking water it serves to customers (the featured family, with rotting teeth and rashes from bath water, drank from a private well). Run water through enough money, they say, and you can filter anything out (no, it’s not an excuse to pollute — the less bad stuff that goes in, the less money we need to spend taking it out. But how far will ratepayers go to remove industrial pollutants? What ever happened to polluter pays?) The story also doesn’t quantify how many of the drinking-water violations were for illegal levels of contaminants versus violations of reporting requirements. (Then again, operators who fail to report test results or file other paperwork often have something to hide.) The story’s bottom line: inadequate funding threatens our municipal water supplies. Watersheds are unprotected (not enough state inspections, enforcement, or spine), pipes are breaking, underfunded treatment plants are failing to remove contaminants.

Finally, I just want to say thank dog for the New York Times, a free (and adequately funded) press,  and the Freedom of Information Act. Double my subscription.

The New York Times ran a front page story yesterday on atrazine in drinking water (part of its series on worsening water pollution) and the state of federal tap-water regulation of this super-common weed killer (not good).  The chemical is worrisome because of its ubiquity, its links with birth defects and low birth weights, and because it may have effects at levels lower than those previously suspected. (U.C. Berkeley’s Dr. Tyrone Hayes, who correlated low-level atrazine exposure to deformities like extra legs in frogs, was absent from the Times story. You can read about his research in this article I did for Discover.)

The Times story reminds us that new chemicals appear faster than old ones are being tested, testing is often performed by manufacturers themselves, and mixture effects are difficult to sort out. The thing is, testing drinking water for every possible chemical of concern is extremely expensive, especially at lower and lower concentrations (parts per billion, parts per trillion). If a utility finds a chemical of concern, removing it can be enormously expensive (is this an argument for cleaning up only the small percentage of water we drink??). And after you remove a chemical like atrazine–using powdered carbon, for example–what do you do with it? The utility manager I interviewed in Kansas City said he dumped it back into the river from which it came.

I predict that learning more about low-dose effects of ubiquitous chemicals (perchlorate, MTBE, trichloroethane, perfluorochemicals — all of which have been found in municipal water supplies) will give even committed tap-water drinkers pause. The Times says, “Sometimes, the only way to avoid atrazine during summer months, when concentrations tend to rise as cropland is sprayed, is by forgoing tap water and relying on bottled water or using a home filtration system.” If I were living in farm country and pregnant, nursing, or the mother of a young child, I’d certainly get the best filter I could afford and be sure to use it during spring runoff.

The anti-bottled water groups, which have raised awareness of the products’ environmental footprint and helped to drive down sales of bottled water for the first time in five years, acknowledge that all tap water isn’t perfect and try to steer the public toward filters. But I’ve always found them a bit too trusting of  municipal water supplies, which vary enormously across the country. I wrote an entire book on the pros and cons of both bottled and tap water (the just-released-in-paperback Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water) and was surprised by how complicated the matter is and how local the issue. I realized, too, that living in New York City I was guilty of a certain arrogance — the arrogance of the well-watered –and that ditching bottled water isn’t so easy when you can’t, or shouldn’t, drink what’s coming from the tap.

Still, bottled water isn’t a good long-term solution to our water problems. It’s too expensive, and its environmental costs are too high. Instead, we must fix our municipal systems — upgrade treatment plants to remove contaminants, repair and lay new pipes to deliver water and, most important of all, better protect our watersheds from chemical and other pollution (this includes limiting deforestation and development). This past July, Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer introduced legislation to establish a $10 billion annual water trust fund that will, according to his website, “be financed broadly by small fees on such things as bottled beverages, products disposed of in wastewater, corporate profits, and the pharmaceutical industry. . . .  The $10 billion annual fund will create more than 250,000 jobs.”

I don’t know if the legislation will pass, but I do know that we don’t really have a choice about whether or not to protect (and improve) municipal water supplies. We’re talking about water here – the stuff of life! Yes, people of means won’t have a problem importing privately bottled “pristine” drinking water (so long as that water – and the oil to pump and transport it – lasts), but the vast majority of us can’t afford this and won’t.

What can you do? Demand to know what’s in your water, do independent testing at the tap, and contact your utility and elected representatives if you don’t like what you’ve found. Then get yourself a good filter (this site will help you pick one) and a reusable bottle and reach out to your local watershed protection group to offer your support.