We Want Tap is funky new campaign organized by award-winning British advertising agency Provokateur in conjunction with Belu. Provokateur is using their advertising savvy to take on the bottled water industry and get people to return to the tap.
Tap water in the UK is one of the highest quality tap waters in the world. Testing by the Drinking Water Inspectorate in 2006 reported that 99.96% of the 4.5 million samples tested had passed water quality sampling. Yet, even though many developed nations have clean, drinkable water flowing from their taps, people still opt for bottled water. Clever marketing campaigns, misinformation and celebrities (like SmartWater spokeswoman and company investor Jennifer Aniston, who recently visited a Los Angles elementary school to talk about ‘water health’) are shucking bottled water to the masses. The global bottled water habit is doing some serious damage to the planet.
The We Want Tap Campaign explains that ‘tap water is such good value for money that over 25% of bottled water is taken from the mains supply, filtered and flogged back to the general public with a mark up of 3000%. After all that water is enjoyed, only 10% of the water bottles are recycled – the rest go into the landfill. Approximately 2.7 million tons of plastic are consumed each year to make bottled water. Just feeding the British consumers bottled water habit produces an estimated 33,200 tons of CO2 per year.
In North America, the Think Outside The Bottle Campaign is also getting people to return to the tap. Their campaign estimates that meeting Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 17 million barrels of oil a year– enough fuel to operate more than 1 million US cars for one year – and generates more than 2.5 million tons of CO2.
Worldwide, consumers spent an estimated $100 billion on bottled water in 2005. The World Health Organization, in their Water For Life 2005 report, stated it would take $11.3 billion dollars a year to provide drinking water and sanitation to the entire world.
Currently, more than 1.2 billion people live without clean drinking water. We Want Tap estimates that by 2050 that number will quadruple and more than 4 billion people will lack access to clean drinking water.
Resources
Provokateur: http://www.provokateur.com/
Think Outside The Bottle: http://www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org/
We Want Tap: http://www.wewanttap.com/
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