The Bottled Water Dilemma - Tap Water Still Runs Deep.

"Good Evening, may I interest you in a bottle of water?..."

It's the classic server push...and responsible for quite the added bit of income for any restaurant. Working as a server in my younger days, managers always made it a point to remind us to sell the bottled water. A glass cylinder of Voss (supposedly taken from an aquifer "shielded for centuries under ice and rock in the untouched wilderness of Central Norway") can be sold at the table for around eight to twelve dollars, while a case of twenty-four will usually only set the house back by about thirty; Nearly 90% of that Voss becomes pure profit, which can be awfully easy for a restauranteur to swallow. 

On the other hand, that sip might just choke you when you realize, asides from lucrative, bottled water may also be the most quintessential of all environmentally unsustainable choices. Seventeen million barrels of oil are required just to produce the containers that hold the 53 billion gallons of bottled water consumed annually (enough oil to fuel one million cars for the same period of time). And that's not even including the costs involved in shipping these bottle-shaped environmental bombs from Fiji or Évian-Les-Bains. In early March, the United Nations admitted that bottled water wasn't sustainable, right on the heels of Inside The Bottle's release of the animated film "The Story of Bottled Water", sparking international debate. 

So, despite the lost revenue, many restaurants are choosing to either restrict bottled water options or to eliminate the option entirely. In return, these restaurants get to ride the crest of public opinion (Giles Coren, restaurant reviewer for the London Times, claims that he will only give top marks to establishments serving a locally bottled water or none at all), they get to act in the best interests of environmental stewardship, and they get to, just generally, sleep well at night. But the money aspect is certainly not a wash; restaurants operate on such a fine financial line! So how to resign yourself to this lost income?

Well, firstly, you can write it off your budget for advertising: sites like Canada's Green Table, the U.S's Responsible Purchasing Network and Corporate Accountability International, make it their business to proudly proclaim which restaurants have made the blue-green leap of faith. Local news sources will also probably jump at the chance to do a piece on your ban (like ABC's coverage of the bottled water debate, for example).


Secondly, if you'd like to put a bit more muscle behind it, you can invest in a filtration system or a CO2 injector and offer home-filtered water or house-made sparkling at a premium, alongside the option of tap like Alice Waters does at Chez Panisse. Rather than making the lack of bottled water a liability, make it a stance, and people will drink it up. Pun definitely intended. 

(For more ideas, keep your eyes on Montreal come september. Ed's hometown is hosting this year's International Water Association's World Water Congress and Exhibition).