iTAP featured at BevNet

It's official! We're been featured at 2007 BevNet's directory of beverages. A great window into the US market.

I scream iTAP

Welcome. Instead of waving your fist at your computer screen muttering 'Smartarses!', read on.

Arthur Wiesenberger, water master to the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting Awards says, "Canada has some of the best tap water in the world." Municipalities in B.C. and Quebec and have been among the top 5 winners for their tap water for the past seven years.

iTAP offers you - wait for this - a plain old bottle that you refill from the faucet yourself. By drinking tap water, you and I not only poke fun at our friends quaffing so-called "pure" mineral waters from often fictional underground springs - we are also helping the environment by generating less waste.

iTAP reminds customers that water is still just water and no amount of fancy packaging is going to change that, whether we're talking about brands such as Perrier or Aquafina and Dasani, which were recently exposed as being just regular tap water.

So, if you feel a certain kinship with our straight up philosophy and would like to be a little more informed about what makes the iTAP product so special, drop us a message.

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.