What is iTAP?

iTAP is the new anti-brand by EcoFeat Inc., and its target is the bloated bottled water industry.

Despite the hype, iTAP is neither cleaner nor greener than the other hundreds of bottled water brands sold in North America. But one thing you can be sure: our water's composition is public: no ancient glacial wonders or unique purifying secret formula.

Check current Vancouver's public reservoirs conditions.

And in the meantime feel free to put some more tap water from our pristine watershed facilities into that perfect little bottle we call iTAP.

France: Bottled-water backlash

Rejection of the industry's grandiose promises -- and high prices -- has fuelled the return to the tap in France, the world's second largest consumer of bottled water after Italy. That has been attributed to the efficacy of advertising campaigns launched by municipal water companies that extol the benefits, lower cost and environmental virtues of tap water. (In Paris, tap water costs less than a third of a European cent per litre. Groupe Neptune's Cristaline, a popular brand, sells for 15 European cents a litre, while Danone's Evian costs about 60 European cents a litre.) Earlier this year, Groupe Neptune fought back with billboards featuring a photograph of a white toilet marked with a big red "X." "I don't drink the water I use to flush," the posters read. "I drink Cristaline."

How did the ubiquitous accessory become the latest environmental sin?

The alleged health and beauty benefits that made bottled water the preferred constant-hydration libation of celebrities (who can forget that widely circulated photo of Princess Di exiting the gym with her Evian?) are under new scrutiny. In 2004, Coca-Cola Co. recalled its entire Dasani line of bottled water from the British market after levels of bromate, a potentially harmful chemical, were found to exceed legal standards. In March, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency warned the public not to consume imported Jermuk Classic brand Natural Sparkling Mineral Water because it contained excessive levels of arsenic.

Rick Smith, executive director of Toronto-based Environmental Defence, an agency that tracks the exposure of Canadians to pollutants, foresees a looming crisis. "Bottled water is a not only a complete disaster for the environment but potentially for human health," he says. His greatest criticism lies with the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle, the industry's real product. "The production of one kilogram of PET requires 17.5 kilograms of water and results in air pollution emissions of over half a dozen significant pollutants," Smith says. Last year, William Shotyk, a Canadian scientist working at the University of Heidelberg, released a study of 132 brands of bottled water in PET bottles stored for six months, and found that significant levels of antimony, a toxic chemical used in the bottle's production, had leached into the water. The Canadian Bottled Water Association counters that the levels don't pose a risk to humans. "Technically bottled water will not go bad if you properly store it," Griswald says, though she admits algae will build up if it's left in sunlight in high heat.

California: Kick the disposable habit

When Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., in 1971, it was at the vanguard of a "think globally, eat locally" gastronomic uprising. Now, in banning bottled water, the restaurant is at the forefront of another insurgency. The culinary mecca joins a growing number of restaurants willing to forgo 300 per cent-plus markups on bottled water in return for increased customer loyalty. Mike Kossa-Rienzi, Chez Panisse's general manager, says the ecological damage associated with bottling water spurred them to action. "It's something we wanted to do for a while," he says. "Finally I thought, 'This is silly: we have this great water that comes out of our tap.' This is something we really think we need to do. We feel it is the right thing to do."

The notion that a bottled-water backlash could gain velocity might seem absurd given worldwide consumption of 167.8 billion litres in 2005. Canadians spent $652.7 million on bottled water that year, consuming 1.9 billion litres, 60 litres per capita, with sales up 20 per cent last year. Bottled water became a status signifier -- Cameron Diaz favoured Penta, Madonna preferred Voss Artesian Water. Still, we've seen a prop made glamorous by movie stars losing cachet and acquiring stigma before -- the cigarette, for one, the Hummer for another. If early indications of backlash are any sign, what was once a fashion accessory is becoming a fashion crime.

The obvious driving force is green's new vogue. Now that we're shopping to save The Planet, toting a natural resource that costs more than gasoline in a plastic bottle destined to clog a landfill for a thousand years doesn't exactly telegraph eco-cred. Once-stylish water bars with "water sommeliers," like the one at Epic in Toronto's Royal York Hotel offering 25 international brands, suddenly seem passé, out of touch. Earlier this year, Times of London food critic Giles Coren announced his new zero-tolerance toward bottled water on his blog. Drinking it, he wrote, signals a gauche lack of global awareness: "The vanity of it! While half the world dies of thirst or puts up with water you wouldn't piss in, or already have, we have invested years and years, and vast amounts of money, into an ingenuous system which cleanses water of all of the nasties that most other humans and animals have always had to put up with, and delivers it, dirt cheap, to our homes and workplaces in pipes, which we can access with a tap."

Forget the bottle, says David suzuki

Canadians wanting to do something about the environment can start by drinking tap water, environmentalist David Suzuki says. For years, David Suzuki and his brethren have railed against the environmental evils of bottled water -- the recyclable plastic bottles that rarely get recycled. More recently, church groups, including the United Church of Canada, have advocated members boycott the product on the moral grounds that water is a basic human right, not a commodity to be sold for profit. The edict was met by the wider public with much eye-rolling. After all, bottled water is entrenched as an icon of vitality, health, mobility and safety. No amount of righteous talk was about to wean people away.

"Everywhere I go across Canada, I insist I be given tap water when I get up to speak," Suzuki told CBC News on Thursday.

David Suzuki says plastic water bottles generate waste and potential health hazards because of their chemical composition.
(CBC) "I think in Canada it's absolutely disgusting that people are so uncertain about their water that we buy it, paying more for bottled water than we do for gasoline."

Moreover, he said it's destructive to import bottled water from producers in countries such as France.

"It's nuts to be shipping water all the way across the planet, and us — because we're so bloody wealthy — we're willing to pay for that water because it comes from France," he said in an interview.

Canadians wanting to do something about the environment can start by drinking tap water, environmentalist David Suzuki says.

"Everywhere I go across Canada, I insist I be given tap water when I get up to speak," Suzuki told CBC News on Thursday.

David Suzuki says plastic water bottles generate waste and potential health hazards because of their chemical composition.
(CBC) "I think in Canada it's absolutely disgusting that people are so uncertain about their water that we buy it, paying more for bottled water than we do for gasoline."

"I don't believe for a minute that French water is better than Canadian water. I think that we've got to drink the water that comes out of our taps, and if we don't trust it, we ought to be raising hell about that."

Last August, delegates to the United Church of Canada's general council voted to discourage the purchase of bottled water within its churches. The motion called on church members to advocate against the "privatization of water" and to support healthy local supplies of water.

Water regulations

The major problem with bottled water is that we just don't know what is in it. Tap-water regulations make it mandatory that the public water supply is tested daily and that findings are freely available for scrutiny. There are no similar regulations for mineral and spring waters. What we do know, however, is that bottled mineral and spring waters have no health-giving properties over tap water. We also know that, while most bottled waters are safe, their mineral, chemical and bacterial contents mean that they are not as safe as tap water. Yet they cost around 1,500 times as much as tap water.

Before 1980 there were few regulations for tap water. Recent advances in equipment sophistication have meant that substances can be detected now at levels which previously were impossible. As a consequence, materials have been discovered in tap water which previously were unknown. These discoveries have been blown out of all proportion by organisations such as Greenpeace and the media, and we have all fallen for it. We have been duped into believing that tap water is unfit for consumption. American studies have found that drinking tap water in any part of the USA is safer than drinking bottled water. No study there or in Britain has found any benefit with drinking bottled water. While sparkling waters do tend to have a slight advantage, as the carbon dioxide gas used to make them fizz has antibacterial properties, no bottled waters are considered safe enough to be recommended as a drink for children.

We have an anomalous situation where different regulations apply to what is essentially the same commodity, merely packaged in a different way. Bottled waters should be subject at least to the same regulations as tap water. It could be argued, however, that if their advertising is going to stress their inherent purity, and if they are to cost so much more, perhaps their regulations should be even more stringent. There is little doubt that if tap water regulations were applied to bottled waters, many would disappear from supermarket shelves.

Link: Vancouver drinking water quality

Coca - Cola Admits That Dasani is Nothing But Tap Water

LONDON - It made for great headlines, but the fact that the UK version of Coca-Cola's Dasani brand bottled water comes out of the London public supply should hardly have come as a surprise.

"Coke's in hot water," "Eau dear" and "The real sting" were three good examples of the newspaper headline writer's art, but the only real difference between Dasani and many other bottled waters is that the humble origin of the product is firmly in the spotlight.

Figures from independent beverage research company Canadean show that at least two out of every five bottles of water sold around the world are, like Dasani, "purified" waters, rather than "source" waters which originate from a spring. Most of the supermarket own-label bottled waters consist of treated mains water. They may be dechlorinated, filtered further, purified using ultraviolet light and have minerals either added or subtracted. They may also be carbonated. In short, they are subjected to many of the same treatments that source waters undergo to satisfy public health requirements after being pumped up from the ground.

Alongside flagship brands such as Evian, Perrier, and Malvern, most of the big-name water producers market several purified water lines, often in countries where the safety of the public water supply is a concern. Nestle's Pure Life is one such leading brand and PepsiCo's Aquafina is another, while Danone's Sparkletts and Alhambra marques are top sellers in the United States, where mains water purity is not usually an issue.

You also have mixed source waters, like Nestle's Aquarel, which comes from seven different springs. Such spring water is cheaper to produce and therefore to sell, and has proved a big hit with consumers in Europe and elsewhere. But generally speaking, anything that doesn't say "source" or "spring" on the label is just fancy tap water.

The origin of UK Dasani (it's produced all around the world but is always purified rather than source water) came to light when a complaint was made to the British Food Standards Agency over Coke's use of the word "pure" in its Dasani marketing. The complaint, now being dealt with by the local authorities where Dasani is bottled in Sidcup, east London, hinges on the charge that the marketing implies that tap water is 'impure'.

As a market for bottled water, the UK is relatively immature. Britons consume an average of 28 litres of bottled water per year, compared with about 140 litres for Italy and France. So the fact that bottlers take water, purify it further and sell it on can hit the headlines, especially if the water producers take a substantial mark-up in the process.

"Coke didn't do itself any favours by not getting the water supplier on side to begin with," one drinks industry insider said of the local supplier Thames Water.

Like Nestle, McDonald's and Cadbury Schweppes, Coke makes a gratifying target for journalists, in that all those companies trade heavily on their brand. That makes them extremely vulnerable to criticism, as Coke already found to its cost with its failed "New Coke" launch.

In the developing world you usually buy bottled water because it's clean, or because it doesn't taste of chlorine. In the west, it's a "lifestyle choice". Most consumers in developed countries would accept that the water that comes out of their taps is clean enough and quite serviceable for cooking, washing or even drinking. But just as a pair of supermarket own-brand running shoes will do the job, Nike, Reebok and Adidas can all charge top dollar for the kudos, the street cred, the style statement they make.

This is the essence of brand equity, and it's why consumers are happy to pay over the odds for Welsh TyNant water in Cyprus, or French Evian in the Peruvian Andes. It's also why the "water sommelier" has become a feature of upmarket U.S. restaurants.

"Branding does matter, even for a mundane product like water," Frits van Dijk, chief executive of Nestle Waters, said last year.

"We produce value-added waters. Marketing and R&D all have to be financed somehow and that's why you'll never see Nestle in the very low price market. It's not our territory."