The town of Bundanoon, Australia is now the world’s first bottled-water-free town. Over 350 people attended a public meeting at town hall, where community members voted overwhelmingly to ban bottled water. According to news reports, just one person voted against the ban.
A Bundanoon grassroots campaign called Bundy on Tap, couldn’t be happier. They’ve been working since March 2008, when the organization began, to ban single-use plastic bottles of water.
Recently, when a drink company announced that they would soon tap an underground reservoir in town in order to bottle and sell the water in Sydney, even more community members came on board with the concept to ban bottled h2o. “The company has been looking to extract water locally, bottle it in Sydney and bring it back here to sell it,” John Dee, a local campaigner, said. “It made people look at the environmental impact of bottled water and the community has been quite vocal about it.” Dee added, “We believe Bundanoon is the world’s first town that has got its retailers to ban bottled water.”
The Premier of New South Whales, Nathan Rees, is, according to the BBC, “ordering government departments to stop buying bottled water and use tap water instead.” And local shopkeepers in Bundanoon have supported the ban as well.
Bundanoon has filtered water stations which are “prominently sign posted” according to Bundy on Tap, and select retail stores have installed chilled water filters in-store so customers can fill their reusable bottles for cheap. To top it all off, students at the Bundanoon Primary school are given reusable water bottles, and can fill them up at the school’s filtered water bubbler.
[Via: BBC]
[Photo Via: Klearchos Kapoutsis]
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Very cool. It shows that perspective can really make a difference.
About time some common sense prevailed. Unless you are traveling in some of the developing countries, notorious for lack of potable water, there is no need to pay good money for virtually free water.
Well done. The most credit here must go to the store owners who have cooperated as they lose money. What an excellent example of what can be done when some smart people get together. I’d like to live there, although the town with a cat curfew would be good too.
I can usually find a way to dispose of my garbage conscientiously but it’s oftentimes depressing whenever I find out what the rest of the world is doing to this planet!
Thank you Bundanoon for leading the way in this (what seems to be just common sense) action. This type of forward thinking will, in the future, be recognized as the big step that it really is. America WAKE UP!
Good job! You’ve helped the soda companies completely eliminate their largest competition. Strange how plastic bottles are polluting and wasteful when it’s water they hold; but safe, hygienic and convenient when they contain soda.