High-profile companies such as Pepsi, Nestlé and Coca-Cola have some fierce new competition in town: city hall.
In an effort to decrease Ottawa’s bottled water consumption, the city’s environmental working group has been asked to develop a strategy to end bottle sales at city facilities and promote the safety and cleanliness of municipal tap water.
Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes has been championing the cause since it was first introduced to council more than two years ago.
“I felt that the issue was not going very far, or very fast,” says Holmes.
“People are paying for a safe water system with their taxes, so why would they go and buy it from somewhere else?”
In fact, the City of Ottawa spends $90 million annually to supply water to more than 800,000 residents, says Holmes.
As a first step, vendors in facilities owned by the city will be asked to remove bottled water for sale.
Additional staff will also be hired to promote tap water, and new water fountains will be installed at indoor facilities and outdoor parks.
The city is also hoping to provide tap water for crowds at festivals and events in the form of a mobile water trailer, an idea that was inspired by a similar program in Toronto called H20 TO GO.
Although council has called for change throughout the Ottawa area, Larry Wade, a member of the Ottawa Water Study Action Group, insists that council has to take its own advice.
“When city councillors are drinking bottled water during their meetings, it does not show the community that we have confidence in Ottawa’s water supply,” Wade says.
According to a report drafted by Holmes, 125,000 water quality tests occur annually throughout municipal, federal, private and university laboratories – a figure that suggests municipal tap water may, in fact, be safer than its pricey alternative.
Ottawa is lagging behind other Canadian cities when it comes to banning bottled water, says Joe Cressy, Polaris Institute researcher and member of the Inside the Bottle campaign – a program that strives to raise awareness about the environmental, health and economic impacts of bottled water.
“We have 69 municipalities in eight provinces and one territory that have restricted bottled water and committed to building municipal tap water infrastructure,” he says.
“Too many residents in Ottawa don’t have access to fountains and the city absolutely has to expedite this process.”
Advertisements promoting tap water will soon appear on city buses, radio programs and flyers distributed throughout the city as the next phase of the campaign, says Holmes.
A final report on the new strategy is expected to be ready for presentation to the planning and environment committee in October.
The report could go before council as early as two weeks after that.
“I want to see this happening this year, and I want to see some money set aside for it in the budget,” says Holmes.
“We need to start counteracting the advertisements of bottled water companies.”