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Tap Water: Cheap, Environmentally Sound, and Now Trendy?

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[image via Pur]

Remember the aha moment when you realized that Evian is 'naive' spelled backwards?
It was a moment of clarity, of sanity. You wouldn't be duped. You wouldn't be one of those status-seeking suckers out there who were buying into baseless health claims and slick marketing. You knew that the Emperor was just plain naked.

So what happened?
You did become one of them. We all did.
We're drinking more bottle water than ever—85 million bottles every single day. But there is one bright spot; one place where we have curbed the habit and are going out of our way to specify tap: tap water orders are way up in restaurants. According to the consumer research group NPD, restaurant tap water is one of the fastest-growing beverage orders, increasing annually by nearly a billion servings.

Economic conditions are clearly behind the trend. In the current recession, we've barely cut back on the frequency of dining out—just one percent in the past 5 years—but we're looking for ways to trim the tab. We're keeping dessert and dumping the bottled water.

Tap water also has a kind of reverse status for the restaurants.
For three decades, beginning with the Perrier days of the 1970s, restaurants were guilty of promoting water elitism. They sent their waiters out to push high mark-up/high margin bottled water menus, and made us feel like cheapskates when we chose the tap. Now they're shunning bottled water to demonstrate their locavore and sustainability bonafides, and frankly, they owe us this one.

There's an environmental upside to the down economy. Since 2006, just this little switch to tap water in restaurants has already save 8.75 billion gallons of water, and all the associated packaging, transportation, recycling, and landfill waste. The challenge is to make this change permanent, and not lapse into our old water habits when the economy turns around.

Gigabiting: where food meets culture and technology.

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