Tappening

An attempt in branding tap water to save the Planet

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

In 2007, Eric Yaverbaum of Ericho Communications and Mark DiMassimo of DiMassimo Goldstein (DIGO) were screening Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home, a movie showcasing how the family household and its waste has become one of the greatest environmental issues of our time. While watching the movie, Yaverbaum had an “aha moment”, so shocked he was shocked at the real impact of his bottled water consumption on the environment.

For him it was realizing the waste that those plastic bottles cause but, as far as we should be concerned it is not the bottle alone that is the culprit but the very fact that water is needlessly drawn off the general supply and the supply of that of the Earth.

People perceive that – much due to advertising and clever marketing – bottled water is cleaner, safer and healthier than tap water. But this is not the case more than 90% of the times. Tap water has much more stringent environmental health rules and tests attached to it than does any so-celled spring water.

Since its creation, the Tappening site has had millions of visitors, and sales of their re-usable water bottles are through the roof. It more than likely is not solely be on account of Tappening – in fact we can be certain that it is not – because there are a lot of great groups out there, but tap water is certainly making a comeback. For the first time in history, Pepsi announced this month that its quarterly earnings were down 10%, mostly on account of decline in sales of bottled water and soda.

Yaverbaum, one of the co-founders of Tappening, is a man who once worked for the industry to brand Vitamin Water but who now keeps the last bottle of water he ever drank (it was back in 2007) on his windowsill.

Vitamin Water is still being advertised and advocated as a healthy water full of important vitamins. Sorry, what?

Tappening is a great name, I think, for the campaign but then again so is “I Want Tap”, etc. The fact is that tap water is fine in most places in the developed world and, well, if you do not like the fact that it has a small amount of chlorine in it (and in some place fluoride – and that's were I also wanted to do something) run the water you drink through a filter, whether an inline one, a Big Berky or a Britta Jug.

Being probably lucky that the tap water in Britain, especially where I live and in the London region per se, is a good one I am happy to also just take it from the tap without the use of a filter.

I do use a filter though for the water that I use in the kettle as our water is very hard and it keeps out most of the lime scale problems.

So, let's go tappening.

© 2011