Dear WWE,

Harry Troedel forwarded me your details in regards to Melbourne’s move towards becoming a disposable water-bottle free campus.  Thanks very much for helping us out by putting all of our drinking water fountains in your app.

I will be updating our website with some more information about the campaign and would be greatly interested in some high res screen shots, icons, artwork of Water Water Everywhere – whatever you’ve got.  In addition, I will forward our promotional material, and we would love for you to promote it on your website!  Attached is a advertisement that we are currently using.

Regards,

Melanie

_________________________________________________

Melanie Ashe

Sustainability Project Officer

Property & Campus Services I Sustainability Unit

Thanks a lot, Melanie.

And for those who are interested, here’s a screenshot of the fountains and a a flyer about her work:

If you’d like to follow Melanie’s lead and you need any help from us, let us know.

Here are two documentaries on the planet’s use of water.

The first, Flow, examines the importance of water and the consequences of future shortages:

The second is called Blue Gold and it looks at the possibility of water becoming a scarce and valuable commodity, fought over in much the same way as oil is today:

(Thanks to John for both links.)

One of the most satisfying things about Water Water Everywhere is the degree to which it has inspired other people to become involved, taking the project on and helping it to grow in ways we hadn’t even thought of.

The latest of these is Bruce Stainsby, who has gone so far as to create a proposal to spread the word through Australia’s community newspapers. In a brilliantly detailed proposal, he suggests the following:

Using the WWE iPhone app as a catalyst, we will market the availability of fresh tap water to the community via a Water WaterEverywhere Promotion.

Melbourne City Council have already provided WWE with a list of 260 drinking fountains within the city area. Councils throughout Australia provide similar facilities but many people don’t know about them.
News Limited Community Newspapers are a vital link between the average Australian and their local community. They are therefore a logical partner for this project, because of their community involvement and their local advertisers.
The availability of the free WWE iPhone 4 app will be part of any promotion. All we need to do is include the Apple App Store logo. This will immediately give the consumer something for nothing and in so doing spread the availability of free tap water. The interactive nature of the app will ensure that more and more locations are added.
It will also reflect well on the brand equity of all concerned.

Possible partners:

• State government

• Local councils

• Local water retailers

• Local establishments, such as pubs and fast food restaurants, that provide free tap water.

News Limited Community Newspaper’s involvement: The Water Water Everywhere Promotion will be an awareness campaign, run by News Limited Community Newspapers and involving all the relevant advertisers. The aims will be to promote the quality of our drinking water and the places you can find it freely available.
This will be done on a community-by-community basis, allowing for maximum local involvement.
As is always the strategy with News Limited Community programs, this level of community involvement wouldn’t be available in a daily metropolitan paper.
The benefits: The commercial benefits to you are that you will have an opportunity to approach the state governments, local councils, water suppliers and other establishments to help you fund the promotion and get incremental advertising dollars.

The commercial benefits to your clients, is that they will have the chance to promote their services on different levels.
• State governments will promote the quality of their catchmentareas and water services.
• Local councils will promote their drinking fountains.
• Local water retailers will promote the quality of their product.
• Local establishments will promote the availability of free tap water to the public.
The social benefits are also great as News Limited Community Newspapers and their advertising partners will be part of a socially responsible program that will help the environment and save people money.
The PR opportunities for everyone are endless.
What it will cost you: As the idea of WWE and the development of the iPhone app have all been done for free. Our aim is purely philanthropic – to encourage people to use the excellent tap water that is freely available throughout Australia.

This is only the introduction to several visualised examples of how the above can be brought to life. It’s very well done and very persuasive.

Great stuff.

Thanks, Bruce.

We were in Selfridges today and came across this:

It’s a big installation/ad/public service announcement in the middle of London’s second most famous department store.

Its purpose is to sell Sodastream, but if that motive leads to things like this then that’s fine by us.

(By the way, we’ve had a Sodastream for months now and it’s brilliant. No fuel used to transport carbonated water and no waste. It’s also much, much cheaper. If you like fizzy water, get yourself one today.)

It comes hot on the heels of an ad we saw in Friday’s London Evening Standard for a home water dispenser that gives you cold filtered tap water in your kitchen. Like Sodastream, it was being sold on its environmental benefits.

If any of you spot any more of these nods in the right direction, let us know.

Here’s a post from the San Francisco Chronicle highlighting the new ‘tap water refilling stations’ that the city has recently provided.

It’s a written with a kind of snooty bemusement, but we’re just going to ignore that and look at the further good works of a city who have a campaign with the tagline: ”Don’t fall into the plastic water bottle trap. Drink tap!”

And we’ve been noticing more and more adverts recently for water companies who are using the anti-bottled angle to promote their goods. Of course, it’s all in the interests of their improved bottom line, but we couldn’t care less, just as long as tap wins over bottled.

A few people sent us this article from yesterday’s Guardian.

‘So will you all stop carrying round those little bottles of water and sipping from them during meetings? Because now we know it’s all cobblers, it’s going to be even more annoying.’

Then there’s this equally smart story on Aquaholics.

‘The recession and a possible backlash caused by the considerable environmental concerns surrounding bottled water have seen sales drop. According to Mintel’s new report on the bottled water market, UK sales went down 16% between 2006 and 2009, and again in 2010, though at a slower rate – this was thanks to heavy discounting – and the research analysts are not expecting sales to pick up until 2014. But whether our obsession with drinking water – bottled or tap – is evolving into something more sensible remains to be seen. Aquaholics, however, please take note. “The National Academy of Sciences in the United States did a very extensive study several years ago assessing water intake,” says Professor Goldfarb. I can hear the smile in his voice. “Their executive summary was: drink when you’re thirsty.”‘

Spread the word

Here’s a guest post from Alex at Quench (blog here)

Take a Stand – Ban the Bottle.
Each day more cities, universities, companies and the like are taking a stand against bottled water as a worldwide campaign to ban the bottle continues to grow.
Back in 2007, the Mayor of San Fransisco first banned the use of city funds towards the purchase of bottled water. Then, in the fall of 2009, Bundanoon, a tiny town two hours south of Sydney, Australia was the first to ban bottled water in its entirety. This all happened because a local retailer wanted to educate the townspeople about their environmental impact. Not long after, the whole town took a pledge to remove all bottled water from every shelf and every fridge. Now, almost 2 years later, many cities, towns, and provinces have made a similar effort towards the cause.
But why you should I do this, you might ask? Just under 1.3 million tons of plastic PET water bottles were produced in 2006. 76.5% of those water bottles ended up in landfills. This does not even include the energy that is wasted in the production and transportation of bottled water.
But if taking this leap for ubiquitous plastic bottles and images of ever-filling landfills isn’t enough, take cost and health into consideration. Today, more than 50% of Americans drink bottled water as their major source of drinking water, completely ignoring the fact that U.S. tapwater is a high quality, low cost alternative. Bottled water is at least 300 times more expensive than tap water.
Outside of our daily lives, there are significant costs as well. “Particularly in lean budget times, a dollar spent on bottled water is a dollar spent on city services, especially when it is cheaper from the tap,” said Tony Winnicker, a spokesman for Mayor Newsom of San Fransisco. For the office, there are additional costs in the transportation and delivery of the bottled water coolers that should also be considered which can add up to about 90% of the bottled water costs.
There’s also the health risks. Bisphenol-A, or BPA as it’s more commonly known, is a chemical found in most plastic water bottles. Since it was discovered in 1998, the list of its harmful side effects seems to be continuously growing. Recently it has been strongly linked to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, miscarriage, and childhood asthma.
There’s a reason why Time named ‘the war on bottled water’ #4 on its Top 10 FoodTrends. “Once hip, bottled water is now unforgivably ‘90s,” John Cloud writes in the article.Many contest that banning bottled water is impractical, but if it is initiated with certain plans inplace, this can have a positive effect on the city’s environmental impact, health, and wallet.

Thanks, Alex. By the way, his company is contributing to the solution by providing bottleless water coolers. Check them out here.

In today’s Observer, columnist Barbara Ellen takes drinkers of bottled water to task:

Experts say that there is no health benefit to drinking eight glasses of water a day. Now they tell us, after decades of nagging that constantly glugging H₂0 was the secret of well-being and anyone who resisted would end up as a parched, wizened crone on an early deathbed. All phooey.

One wonders where this leaves what I term the Small Bottle of Water People. You know the types – they constantly wander around with small bottles of water, looking virtuous and smug, perhaps to compensate for their complete lack of personality.

They are the kind of people who look down their noses at the good, honest, caffeine-blasting, gullet-melting coffee some of us require to achieve some semblance of consciousness in the morning. They make sipping peevishly at overpriced aqua resemble a noble calling – when really they’re just chumps.

In the fortunate west, we’re all only about 10 metres from a working tap at all times, so there’s no need to lug around your own supply.

Now I worry about the Small Bottle of Water People because they’re all going to look extremely stupid. But then, they always did.

We couldn’t agree more.

This morning the Water water Everywhere app received a list of 265 water fountains in central and suburban Melbourne, supplied by the Melbourne City Council.

So the fountains look like this:

And the map looks like this:

Now we’re looking to add Sydney.

So wherever you are in the world, add locations, tell your friends, spread the word and download the app.

Every drop counts.

Here at Water Water Everywhere we do like a fizzy drink, but that want does seem to be somewhat at odds with our feelings about the waste and damage caused by bottled water.

But then it occurred to us that a solution might be much cheaper and easier than we thought.

Remembering a childhood of cheap cola and Irn-Bru, we went and bought a Sodastream, and now we carbonate tap water as and  when we need it. It means that we don’t have to bring heavy bottles back from the supermarket and we don’t have to add to the strain on recycling and landfill when we’re finished.

Although we thought we were the only people to have thought of this solution, it seems to good people of Sodastream are also aware of this, and are trying to spread the word.

Perhaps you’d like to do the same.