In my year at CU Boulder I was part of this Take Back the Tap program, that promotes tap water use over bottled water purchasing. Tap water is more regulated than bottled water because of its public use, and as we experience here in NYC, tap water can be as delicious as the Fiji bottled water we've talked about. On this site it does list The New School participates in Take Back the Tap but I am struggling to find the club. Nonetheless, this campaign has some very interesting resources that only prove further how bottled water can be more of an accessory than a necessity...I witnessed some of this accessorizing this weekend:
On the blue line, on my way to Brooklyn. I'm sitting on a warm seat, my phone dead, watching the doors open and close with every faint "Ting!" Some stops are grubbier than others, with hot and stinky odors following the passengers who enter the train. I watch fathers and daughters, tired workers, excited and inebriated college kids, among other people of various shapes and sizes enter and sit on the orange seats. Now the seats are full, it's a busy night on the C train. Two young women enter, in mid-conversation. Head to toe, they are dressed in black. Their jeans look worn and expensive, their shoes the popular Nike design, and their hair tossed up in bohemian buns. In their hands, Smart Water bottles. No purses, just the bottles. As they stand solid, without the aid of the handrails, both women let their long and slim arms outline their body. The bottles hang beside their hips. One of them is empty. The other has barely a sip of water left. For the next twenty minutes the water remains in the bottle. Then the women finally slide out through the doors, with their empty bottles, past the trash cans.
