Students increasingly battle bottled water sales on campus

Bottled water is bad.  That is the thrust of the campaign Linfield College students Collin Morris and Annika Yates have been waging in an attempt to stop the product from being sold on the Oregon school’s campus.

Inspired by the larger movement triggered by Food & Water Watch, the students have held events at Linfield attempting to educate students about the apparent wastefulness and pointlessness of buying something they can already get for free.

The pair also put together “Tap That,” a short documentary further explaining both the alleged ills of bottled water and the relative value of its chief competitor, water that comes from the tap.

The film's gist: Bottled water is not healthier than tap water, and at times is simply tap water repackaged.  The plastic bottles are environmental boondoggles.  And the entire bottled water industry is a cash cow at consumers’ expense.

The bottle-tap fight has many combatants espousing many perspectives, including those who argue tap is less healthy than bottled and filtered water.  But the anti-bottle contingent has been notably gaining ground on some campuses and earning related media attention.

A mid-February post on The Salt, National Public Radio’s food blog, confirmed, “Bottled water is trickling away from college campuses nationwide, thanks to the efforts of student activists and the non-profit groups that support them.”

In the Q&A below, Morriss discusses the campaign he and Yates are waging and the documentary they created to help their fight.

Q:What motivated you to start your campaign?

A: I’ve been interested in environmental and social issues and have been trying to get involved with different campaigns on my campus.  I found myself last spring at Power Shift in Washington D.C., where 10,000 youth from around the country who are really passionate about environmental issues all congregated for the weekend.  It was a weekend full of public speakers . . . and there were different workshops.  College students would put on these workshops and teach college students how to run effective campaigns on their own campus.

One of the things that got me really interested was the whole Take Back the Tap campaign, which is a national movement that Food & Water Watch has been running.  A lot of students have successfully banned water bottles on their campuses and there were effective strategies that students laid out for us there.  I decided to take it back to my own campus because I didn’t see why I couldn’t run an effective campaign as well.

I approached Annika and we both decided that this was something we wanted to take on.  We started this past fall.  We were both in a Politics in the Arts class as well.  We approached our professor for a capstone project and asked if we could create a documentary for our campaign and use that as a project.  He was all for it.

Q: For those of us regularly buying and drinking bottled water, what has your campaign been attempting to explain about the product and the companies that create, market, and sell it?

A: It depends on how you view water.  I personally view water as a basic need and a basic right.  If you look at the percentage of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water in the world and the fact that in the West we are consuming these bottled waters on such a large scale and such a wasteful scale it kind of puts it into perspective.  It turns out that a lot of these big corporations are actually bottling up public water sources that communities have owned for generations and selling it back to them at an inflated rate.

There’s the whole plastic issue too– the oil and transportation costs that go into making this plastic.  Then, once the bottled water is purchased and consumed, only 20 percent of the bottles end up getting recycled and reused.  The other 80 percent end up in a landfill where the plastic takes 700 years to decompose.  So when you look at the whole thing, it seems very wasteful and very pointless too.  I live in the Pacific Northwest and our public water sources here are very, very good.  The water infrastructure is very good compared to some other places.  So there’s no reason to actually have to buy bottled water here.  Just carry around a reusable water bottle and drink tap water.

Q:Why do so many of us feel it is necessary to drink bottled water and ensure all tap water is first run through a filter?

A: It was actually a brilliant marketing move by some of the giant corporations.  Both Pepsi and Coke came out with bottled water around the same time.  It started in the ‘70s when soda was starting to get a bad reputation.  Studies started coming out saying how bad soda and high fructose corn syrup were for you.  There was a big scare with investors.  They were really concerned that they would lose a bunch of market share.  So they decided to offer a healthier alternative.  So bottled water was marketed as the next best thing.

Along with that marketing campaign to promote bottled water, they also started bashing on tap water because tap water is an obvious competitor– and a free competitor too.  So they have to do the best they can to convince consumers to pay that $1.50 or $2.00 to get something they could otherwise get for free from the tap.

Q:What can students do on their own campuses if they’re interested in taking on this fight?

A: Check out Food & Water Watch.  It’s a good organization that helps students run effective campaigns on their own campuses.  They have different tool guides online that you can print out and there are some educational resources that you can provide to students on your own campuses.

One of the things we did on our own campus that we showed in the documentary was a taste test between bottled and tap water, a blind taste test. . . . Have students see if they can tell the difference.  The vast majority of the time students won’t be able to tell the difference because 40 percent of bottled water is actually just tap water.  So the tastes are incredibly similar if not exactly the same.

Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa, where he also advises The Minaret student newspaper. He maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters. A complete list of Campus Beat articles is here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.