Take Back the Tap Lead Author: Schuyler Kraus Co-Authors: Faith Bitterman, Autumn Stroble, Kourtney Welsh Acknowledgements: Melanie Funk, Casey Vogt, Xiaoyi Zhang EVRN 460: CAPSTONE | Dr. Kelly Kindscher | May 8, 2014 Contents Executive Summary Introduction A Sustainable Tradition 5 Why Take Back the Tap? 6 The Plan Data Acquisition and Assessment 11 Community Education & Outreach 15 Implementation 16 Additional Future Considerations KU Community 21 Lawrence Community 21 2 Executive Summary The bottled water industry negatively affects local water systems, public health, the environment, and people, resulting in multiple complex and far-reaching environmental injustices. Private bottled water manufacturers, such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola, often invade small communities (unannounced) and harvest municipal water resources at a cost of less than one cent per gallon. Simultaneously, they propagate the idea that municipal water systems are inferior and impure. As a result of their clever marketing schemes, bottled water is widely misperceived as cleaner, safer, and healthier than tap water, when in fact the water bottle industry is largely unregulated, and damaging to the environment and public health.i That the public holds false beliefs about the superior nature of bottled water is a lifeline for the industry; it is the sole reason private companies are still able to exploit local water resources and sell them back to consumers, albeit in an individualized, fancy bottle, but degraded and at up to 10,000 times the price compared to tap water.ii Take Back the Tap is a national campaign by Food and Water Watch seeking to undermine the bottled water industry by assisting students in efforts to ban the bottle on their respective campuses. Though our name is inspired by the national campaign, we do not use their campaign materials, nor are we advocating for a campus-wide bottled water ban at this time. Our campaign’s goal is to reduce the overall sales of bottled water on campus by restoring consumer confidence and investment in our local municipal water system. Our objectives include [1] educating the University of Kansas (KU) community about issues of sustainability regarding bottled water and the differences between bottled and tap water and [2] providing an accessible, sustainable alternative to bottled water on campus. We propose establishing a network of hydration stations that fill bottles with filtered tap water that students and faculty can plug into with a reusable Take Back the Tap water bottle. As a holistic campaign, Take Back the Tap facilitates education, engages a diverse group of stakeholders and provides tangible, sustainable solutions for all those who seek to hydrate on campus grounds. Take Back the Tap at the University of Kansas is not alone. There are many universities with similar student-led campaigns that have successfully provided safe and accessible tap water across campuses, increased student and faculty awareness on the environmental and social consequences of the bottled water industry. Over 125 universities have initiated such campaigns. Of these, 84 have prohibited sales of bottled water, including Washington University in St. Louis, Drake University (Iowa), Oberlin College (Ohio), Harvard, Stanford, and Brown (see Figure 1). 3 Figure 1: Universities With Bottled Water Initiatives Caption: Red – Bottled water initiatives; Green – Partial ban on sales; Blue – Campus-wide ban on sales. Due to the initiative’s popularity, The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) now awards points for bottled water bans under “Water Initiatives” in their Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS). Adopting Take Back the Tap will benefit the university in a multitude of ways. It will increase the university’s recognition as a sustainable institution of higher learning, contribute to the overall sustainability literacy on campus, enable students from a wide variety of departments to engage in sustainable behavior on a daily basis, save students, faculty, and staff money, and ensure that everyone on campus has access to filtered water, regardless of their ability to pay for it. 4 Introduction A Sustainable Tradition In keeping with KU’s “Building Sustainable Traditions” (July 2011), Take Back the Tap is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary way to integrate social, environmental, and economic sustainability into our campus environment. Our objectives (education and the installation of a network of hydration stations) engage students in sustainable practices on a daily basis, thereby increasing sustainability literacy and sustainable behavior on campus. Educational materials illustrate all three dimensions of sustainability by explaining equity, environmental, and economic aspects of bottled water. Hydration stations provide an opportunity for KU to start reducing and reusing before recycling, thereby decreasing the amount of waste produced on campus. Take Back the Tap (TBTT) is an opportunity for KU to model sustainable behavior to other universities and communities across the state. It fulfills key objectives of “Building Sustainable Traditions” in the following ways: Administrative, Development, and Planning Objective 1.2: Sustainable drinking water infrastructure integrates sustainability into physical development. Objective 1.4: Take Back the Tap cultivates a broad understanding of sustainability among the KU community. Objective 3.1: Students, faculty, and staff can engage in sustainable behavior on a daily basis by filling a reusable bottle at a hydration station, seeing a visual of the impacts of bottled water while doing so. Curriculum and Research Objective 2.1: Students from all disciplines are exposed to the campaign; it serves as a multidisciplinary sustainability educational opportunity. Objective 2.2: Revenue from selling water bottles can be put toward sustainability scholarships (see “Implementation”). Objective 3.2: This program can serve as a model to other campuses and communities interested in sustainability throughout Kansas. Student Life Objective 1.1: During orientation, students will be introduced to the campaign and receive a reusable water bottle, a map of hydration stations, and an information pamphlet on sustainability and water. Objective 1.2: This is a student group that is trying to implement a campus sustainability effort. If adopted, it can communicate the importance of cultivating and maintaining student passion behind sustainability initiatives to bring about positive change. Objective 1.4: As part of the KU experience, TBTT will be an informal opportunity for students to learn “sustainable life skills … outside the classroom.” Built Environment Objective 1.1: Including a minimum amount of hydration stations per building is a standard that would support a “more sustainable built environment.” Objective 1.3: By directing individuals to municipal water sources, the inclusion of hydration stations in the built environment results in a smaller physical footprint in terms of water and energy consumption. Procurement Objective 1.1: Providing students, faculty and staff with reusable bottles and access to free filtered water will result in a net decrease in the amount of bottled water sold on campus, thereby “[reducing] the use of disposable goods.” Objective 2.1: Along with increasing the amount of environmentally and socially responsible goods purchased comes decreasing the volume of unsustainable, both socially and environmentally, products purchased. Also, hydration stations qualify as a sustainable purchase. Waste Objective 1.1: Only recycle when you have failed to both reduce and reuse. TBTT strongly emphasizes this lesson and is a way to act on it. Objective 2.1: As mentioned above, TBTT illustrates and provides a way for people to engage with the notion that the first step in managing waste is reducing consumption, providing an opportunity for the KU community to increase their education and engagement with waste issues. 5 6 Why Take Back the Tap? Lax Regulation While Americans often perceive bottled water as safer, cleaner, and healthier than tap water, it is estimated that 40-60% of bottled water is actually just packaged municipal tap water that escapes Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.iii Under federal law, the EPA oversees the regulation of tap water, but does not have authority to extend its jurisdiction to bottled water.iv Instead, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with that responsibility, because bottled water is considered a food/beverage item. However, the FDA can only regulate products that fall into the category of “interstate commerce,” meaning that a bottle of water must cross state lines sometime between when it is bottled to when it is sold in order for the FDA to have any jurisdiction. This occurs about 40 percent of the time, the implication being that roughly 60 percent of bottled water sold in the U.S. is completely unregulated.v Even for the 40% of bottled water that the FDA is charged with monitoring, the quality of the product is questionable. Municipalities are required to test their water multiple times per day and regularly submit test results and quality reports to the EPA. Not only are these reports carefully reviewed by government agencies, they are released for public scrutiny and then archived for 5-10 years.vi The City of Lawrence, for instance, conducts water quality tests 3 times per day and, in 2013, reported not one violation of EPA standards.vii On the other