Community Views Documentary "Tapped", Launching Campaign to Spring to the Tap

Thanks, Austin, for bringing together members of the Enumclaw community for the Saturday evening screening of Tapped and discussion of issues around bottled water.   

A couple years' work have led up to this Spring-to-the-Tap event, but as John wrote last week, "it's not the finale".  It is a step along the way to each of us learning more about bottled water and each of us deciding whether to choose it or tap water.

(If this story is new to you, you can get background on Austin and Spring-to-the-Tap issues from or the ).

Austin introduced Mayor Liz Reynolds, who expressed her support for Austin's efforts.  She acknowledged the role of bottled water in emergency situations but was happy to see the larger picture being presented to community members.  "The person walking in here is a different person from the person who will be walking out," she said.

A single blog entry can't do justice to all the issues presented in the film. Which ones even to highlight?  

The impact on the communities when large water companies move in?  The first ten minutes of the film deals with Poland Springs and Nestle in Fryeburg, Maine.  (Not to pick on Nestle--Coca-Cola and Pepsi get considerable attention, too.)  If you want to fact-check, there's lots more online on this subject--you will be overwhelmed with stories if you search "Nestle small towns".  Videos, too.  One I hadn't seen before is an 8-minute film, Nestle in Michigan on YouTube.  Mayor Liz recalled her opposition as a city council member in 2008 to Nestle's efforts to secure guaranteed access to a large share of Enumclaw water (wasn't it 100 million gallons a year?) and establish a water-bottling plant here.  Her speaking out on the council and a ground-swell of community opposition kept that from happening.    

The pollution from bottles?  The industry stresses that 100% of their bottles are made of recyclable material, but in the United States only 20% of them are actually recycled.  Take a look at the Container Recycling Institute's website for numerical and visual graphics on this waste. 

The effects on waterways and oceans?  Many of the bottles mentioned above find their way to the ocean.   I had seen news clips on the North Pacific Gyre (a.k.a. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) and watched videos about it online, but was still taken aback to see all the plastic pieces floating in a jar of sea water.   The researchers had in 2001 trolled for a mile, in an area about as far away from human habitation as anywhere on earth, to gather a sample of sea water and found six times more plastic than plankton.  Repeating the process in 2007, they found 46 times the amount of plankton.  Of course the fish and other sea life ingest those plastic particles (so they enter the food chain, including the human food chain).  In one fish as many as 26 pieces of plastic were found.  

Health and safety issues?  Municipalities must test their water supply many times a day and publish the results.  I didn't know that bottled water companies have no similar requirement.  They do their own testing and do not report it to the public.  Independent tests reported in the film, done on seven brands of store-bought bottled water, some straight off the shelf and some left in a car trunk for a week, brought results of great concern. "Horrifying" was the word the analyst used when discovering such chemicals as benzene, styrene, and bisphenol-A (BPA).  That's an alarming word, so you'll want to check other sources, maybe with a search using "bottled-water recall".  Never having given much thought to bottled water and health issues, I am doing so now.  My kids and grandkids are adults and will make their own choices--Mom/Grammy will just worry. 

All of these issues and others brought out in Tapped need more discussion.  Some people will want to research them further  through articles, websites and videos online, including those from the industry. 

Before the screening a friend told us, "I've heard watching this film will cause me to give up my bottled water.  I don't know--I LOVE my bottled water!  We'll see...."   No feed-back yet on how convincing the film was for this person.  Snippets of overheard conversations after the film indicate that new information was being processed and considered by viewers:  

            "We always recycle--I thought most bottles were recycled."  

            "I didn't know that was happening to the oceans. "

            "I thought the big containers were OK." 

            "I'm going through cupboards to look at our plastics."

            "I did think it was all mountain-spring water!" 

            "The fish and sea-life--what can we do?" 

            "I'm going to come up with a new plan for storing emergency water." (that's me).  

Attendees went home with Spring-to-the-Tap reusable bottles and Mayor Liz's encouragement to " (1) tell ten people what you learned tonight, (2) ask 'What changes can I make to have an impact on this environment?', and (3) make more informed decisions when you go to the grocery store."

Not that effecting real change will be easy.  It's hard for any of us as individuals to change habits; it's hard for a community to change what has become part of a culture.  Our kids and young adults have grown up with bottled water.  How to just give that up? (And it doesn't mean switching to bottled water that has color/flavor/caffeine added.)

But do share Tapped, share information and watch for a culture shift.  Change will come with a lot of individual decisions to skip the case of water from the grocery store, to walk past the machines to the drinking fountain, or to carry a reusable water bottle filled from the tap.

I know this all just touches on the film and the issues.  If you saw the film, please contribute your observations and reactions in the comment section.  It was definitely a valuable experience sharing Tapped with other community members, but if you weren't there, you might access it through Netflix, Vimeo, or Hulu and join the conversation, online and out in the community.

Download the movie