Drink Tap Water

Viridus has lots of great ideas on being green at work, but here is a softball, no-brainer. Stop with the bottled water craziness. I went to an office of a business partner earlier this week and they had cases of bottled water sitting there, all in individual 12 oz bottles. The garbage pail in the conference room was filled with discarded bottles.

This is nuts, especially in Boston where we recently spent $billions on water filtration systems - and our tap water is just as clean as bottled water. Forbes has a good article on the trend away from bottled water.

If you work in an office with bottled water, you have a softball opportunity to impact the environment and help your company save money. Install filtration systems that turn tap water into clean drinking water. Its a no-brainer. Talk to your facilities department today. And if you can't get rid of the bottles, at very least get them to put some recycle bins in the office.

Better yet, just drink tap water. How did we become a country of prima-donnas who can't fathom drinking the tap water we all drank as kids? There is great information available now on the safety of tap water on a town by town basis. And most tap water is perfectly safe (some good info here on the differences between tap and bottled water).

If you can't change the policy on this at work, use good old-fashion peer pressure. How cool will you look drinking tap water, or filtered water, while others are drinking bottled water? Drop some lines about how 90's bottled water is. Ask them if they are also going to have a cigarette in the office. Mention how that bottle of water is more expensive per gallon than gasoline, which by the way is probably now more expensive because so much of it is used to cart around water. Who thought you could be so retro, such a rebel, by simply filling up at the sink?