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At Bella Luna Restaurant in Boston's funky Jamaica Plain neighborhood, you'll find star-shaped paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling and gourmet pizzas named after Red Sox players. Downstairs, the attached Milky Way Lounge & Lanes boasts a seven-lane bowling alley and a Latin dance night on Saturdays.
But there is one thing you won't find at either venue: bottled water.
As a note at the bottom of the restaurant's wine list explains, "In an effort to preserve global resources, Bella Luna does not serve bottled water. We have fountain seltzer water and filtered still water by request."
Bella Luna's CEO, Kathie Mainzer made the decision to can the bottle six months ago after a trip to the Dominican Republic, where residents have to boil their tap water in order to drink it. "I came home realizing what a precious resource water is and how we take it for granted," she says, noting that tap water in Boston is safe, cheap and doesn't lead to more trash. "Here we were throwing away this free resource and generating more disposable items -- it seemed absurd."
Between the bottles of Saratoga Spring she served with dinner and Poland Spring that bar-goers would order downstairs, Mainzer figures she is losing around $500 a month from the decision. But "it was worth it to avoid adding more pollution to the landfills," she says. At the same time, she has also had to educate staff on how to explain the decision to customers, who may never have made the connection. "The first response is, 'Really?' Then the second response is, 'That's great,'" she says. "People are just kind of shocked, because it's new."
New it may be, but the eatery has joined a growing backlash against bottled water by restaurants, city governments, religious organizations and ordinary consumers, who reject it on environmental, economic and even moral grounds. At a time when Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, and consumers are lining up to buy hybrid cars and fluorescent light bulbs to reduce their carbon footprint, they see bottled water as a glaring example of needless environmental waste.
Americans drank some 37 billion bottles of water in 2005, despite the inconvenient truth that in most parts of the country, tap water is not only perfectly safe, but also more tightly regulated that its bottled counterpart. At the same time, manufacturing plastic bottles for bottled water creates an astounding amount of pollution -- an annual equivalent of 1.5 billion barrels of oil, according to Food & Water Watch. Add to that the carbon emissions from transporting water from as far away as Norway (Voss), Italy (San Pellegrino), or Fiji (Fiji), and the billions of plastic bottles that end up in the waste stream, and drinking bottled water does start to seem a little bit of madness.
Yet even at supposedly environmentally conscious stores like Whole Foods Market, bottled water is the No. 1 selling item. Over the past decade, sales have continued to grow 10 percent a year, a rate that would make most companies blush. It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before the industry became a victim of its own success and people began realizing what comedians from Dennis Miller to Janeane Garofalo have been telling us for years -- that "Evian is just naïve spelled backwards."
Earlier this month, the activist group Corporate Accountability International (CAI) brought that message home to the consumers with its new "Think Outside the Bottle Pledge," which commits signees to "opt for public water over bottled water" and support "the efforts of local officials who prioritize strong public water systems." According to the group, CAI has already signed several thousand people on the pledge, including actor Martin Sheen and several mayors around the country.
"By taking this pledge, people are separating the packaging from the product and saying we don't have to create a waste stream of billions of bottles to have a drink of water," says Gigi Kellet, campaign director for the organization. "They are basically saying they are going to do what they can to support strong public water systems and let communities around the country who are struggling to regain control of their resources know they are not alone."
The pledge caps a summer of organizing that has seen the backlash against bottled water go mainstream. Bella Luna isn't the only restaurant to ban bottled water from its menu. The movement burst into public view this spring when chef Alice Waters, the godmother of "California cuisine," nixed bottled water from her Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse. Soon after, Food Network favorite Mario Batali followed suit at his empire of restaurants including Manhattan's swish Del Posto, serving filtered tap water in glasses etched with information on the harmful environmental impact of bottled water
Then cities -- who probably have the most to gain from promoting municipal water -- got into the act. This June, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to cancel the city's purchasing contract for bottled water, mandating instead that city departments rely on tap water that gushes down to the city from its clean reservoirs in Yosemite National Park. The next day, over heavy lobbying from the bottled water industry, Newsom along with progressive Salt Lake City Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak pushed through a resolution at the U.S. Conference of Mayors to commission a study looking at the impact of discarded bottled water bottles on city waste streams.
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Michael Blanding is a freelance writer living in Boston. Read more of his writing at MichaelBlanding.com.
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