Meredith Aska McBride | Philadelphia water: it's what's on tap

Pay a little more for a bottle of water, help a thirsty child in the third world. Sounds great, right?

The founder of Ethos Water was on campus two weeks ago to describe how this business model is going to save the planet.

As far as bottled water goes, Ethos is all right - I mean, if I'm going to allow someone to commodify something essential to my survival, the profits might as well build a well in Bangladesh rather than a pool in an executive's backyard.

But with Americans' growing reliance on bottled water, Ethos will have to help out some people in this country in a few years.

Penn students are no exception - we all know people, probably many people, who refuse to drink tap water, insisting that they'll contract all manner of 19th-century infectious diseases or that the taste is unacceptable.

But drinking bottled water is one of the worse things a person can do for public health, the environment and one's pocket.

"Water is about as necessary to life as you can get," said Anil Venkatesh. The Engineering and College junior runs the Penn arm of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, a national initiative to draw attention to the hidden costs of bottled water and to promote the use of public-water systems.

We all sat through high-school biology - the stuff makes up 70 percent of the human body and it covers the same percentage of the earth's surface. Remember those diagrams of the water cycle? Individual molecules of H2O circulate unstoppably, through plants and animals and people and raindrops and waves on the ocean.

But in the past decade or so, companies like Coke and Pepsi and God help us, something crystal-studded called Bling H2O ("couture water that makes an announcement like a Rolls Royce Phantom".!) have managed to convince us that it's possible to own water.

Think about how ridiculous that is.

When I fork over my dollar-change for 20 ounces of Aquafina (or, you know, my $50 for a bottle of Bling) I now own millions of molecules that used to "belong" to Pepsi, which appropriated them from "public-water sources," according to the company's Web site.

Let's get this straight.

We pay taxes so that our cities can provide services like, oh, water, a naturally occurring substance, and then we pay corporations again for the privilege of drinking that same water run through a filter a couple times and decorated with a pretty label?

At roughly six cents a fluid ounce, I'm never using a toilet again - I'm going to bottle my output and sell it for beer money.

Water's become a status symbol instead of a human right. You've got your Fiji, he's got his Evian and the poor kids are relegated to the bubbler (that's a water fountain, for those not from the Midwest).

This "reduce[s] the public confidence in tap-water systems," said Venkatesh.

In order to ensure a continued high quality of public water - and the Philadelphia water department hasn't had a health violation in over 10 years - all sectors of society need to make this a priority.

True, there are some places where it's still necessary to use bottled water. Venkatesh cited the high levels of lead in Washington, D.C. water as a cause for concern. In disaster areas, municipal water systems often just aren't functioning. And very occasionally a person just needs a drink and there's nothing else available.

Luckily, Penn's not a disaster zone, and Philly has clean tap water. Furthermore, every residence has access to a sink, and academic buildings are overflowing with bubblers. Reusable bottles are cheap and available in many stores near campus, so there's no reason not to carry your own water.

Not only would this return drinking water at Penn to its proper status as a right, not a commodity, it would ease the burden we put on the environment.

"The entire energy costs of the lifecycle of a bottle of water [are] equivalent . to filling up a quarter of each bottle with oil," states Corporate Accountability International, Think Outside the Bottle's parent organization.

By filtering, bottling, packing and shipping all of these exotic waters (and by exotic I mean, of course, the relatively low 60 percent of bottled water that is not tap water), we're wasting an incredible amount of natural resources.

It seems absurd to advocate for "local water" on a campus within spitting distance of a major river. But look around your average classroom - most people won't be drinking the Schuylkill's finest.

So take your own tap-water challenge. Next time you walk past a bubbler, bend down and sip.

You won't regret it.

Meredith Aska McBride is a College sophomore from Wauwatosa, Wis. Her e-mail is mcbride@dailypennsylvanian.com. Radical Chic appears on Wednesdays.

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