Evian or naïve?

When you’re trying to live a sustainable life it’s never quite as simple as choosing between right and wrong. Sustainable or not. Ethical or immoral. There’s always a bit of a blur.

But I might just have stumbled on an area that cuts through the murkiness with crystal clarity… tap water.

Drinking tap water seems to be the latest en vogue sustainable behaviour. Plenty of people are promoting it. There’s the Howies T-shirt slogan encouraging people to ‘drink local’. Design agency Provokateur are behind the ‘We want tap’ campaign encouraging people to ‘take the tap challenge’ and ‘drink responsibly - get on tap’ with sticker give-aways to put on re-used mineral water bottles that boast ‘bottled water is rubbish’ and claim ‘naturally still water’. And at the more upmarket end of the trend, fashion designer Orla Kiely, in the vein of Anya Hindmarsh’s I’m not a plastic bag, has created a stylish refillable water bottle – the Wottle. Unlike Anya’s bags, the provenance of Orla’s bottles is much improved – they’re made in the UK from 100 per cent recycled materials.

All these initiatives are clever branding of a natural product that costs nothing (or very little) to use. But that’s what bottled water companies – and Del Boy with his Peckham Spring Water - have been doing for years, and charging us for it. It can’t just be coincidence that Evian is naïve spelt backwards.

Utilities companies are pushing the tap too. In the North West United Utilities are running a Tap into Water campaign with a clever slant – helping diners overcome the embarrassment of being labelled cheap by asking for tap water. They’ve designed stickers for local restaurateurs to put in their windows encouraging their clientele to ask for the pure stuff and so customers can easily identify them as tap-water friendly places to eat.

Not to be outdone, across the pond UNICEF ran tap project on World Water Day when restaurants invited their customers to donate a minimum of $1 for the tap water they would normally get for free. For every dollar raised, the campaign promised that a child would have clean drinking water for 40 days. It’s typically American but it does show how by tagging actions onto every day behaviours – and New Yorkers eat out almost daily – you can harness the power of collective change, even if only for a day.

As all these examples illustrate the trick to turning people onto tap water is to make drinking it seem normal, desirable even, helping people change together and making ordering tap water socially acceptable.

And finally, as the daughter of dentists I’ve never really been into sugary refreshments, but the Oasis drink Cactus Kid advert really gets me. Am I naïve to think there really are ‘people who don’t like water’?

For all you Oasis drinkers, go on, all together, have a tap water on me.

Archives

• November (21)
• October (28)
• September (16)
• August (13)
• July (18)
• June (15)
• May (31)
• April (6)
• March (1)
• February (2)
• January (1)

Authors

• David Willans (10)
• Jeff Melnyk (5)
• Sinclair Ashman (2)
• Solitaire Townsend (4)
• Ed Gillespie (30)
• Lucy Shea (3)
• Alistair Macdonald (9)
• Futerra team (145)
• Doug Stewart (18)
• Henry Hicks (20)
• Steve Smith (1)
• Emily Wilkinson (1)
• Lulu Kitololo (5)
• Pete Clutton-Brock (1)
• Georgina Combes (12)
• Laurie Bennett (13)
• Fiona Cameron (1)
• Helen Spoor (2)
• Amjad Parkar (1)
• Amisha Ghadiali (1)
• Geraldine Brennan (1)
• Nyree Ambarchian (2)
• Tanja Burgdorfer (3)
• Petra Parizkova (3)
• Natalya Sverjensky (2)
• Maura Dilley (1)
• Emilee Pierce (1)
• Cathy Gray (1)