Washington University Daily - Students ask Gregoire to put emphasis on tap water

By Allen Wagner

UW students Gregory Johnsen, Katy Phillipps and Lisa Umhey pose with a sign urging Gov. Chris Gregoire to require state money not to be used for purchasing bottled water. Photo by Cliff Despeaux.

By Allen Wagner

UW students Gregory Johnsen, Katy Phillipps and Lisa Umhey pose with a sign urging Gov. Chris Gregoire to require state money not to be used for purchasing bottled water. Photo by Cliff Despeaux.

Attending a university that doesn’t sell bottled water could be difficult to imagine.  But officials at Washington University in St. Louis made a tap-water dream become reality when its equivalent to the UW’s Housing and Food Services announced it would no longer offer bottled water. Now, to raise awareness of the issue, students here are pushing for the state to stop using public funds to purchase bottled water for state events or general use.

Members of Think Outside the Bottle (TOTB) and other student groups on campus campaigned on the HUB lawn yesterday after co-signing a letter to Gov. Chris Gregoire to begin the first steps toward pushing for tap-water-only government offices and eventually, a tap-water-only UW campus.

Junior Lisa Umhey, a student organizer for the TOTB campaign, a movement dedicated to the promotion of public water as a drinking source, said the letter was just a beginning to make more students aware of the issues related to bottled water consumption.

“Bottled water is changing the way people are thinking about water and there’s lots of effects … social, environmental and economical,” Umhey said.

TOTB and other student groups, including Students Expressing Environmental Dedication (SEED), hope that by signing a state-wide letter to Gregoire, the government will take the lead by only using public water systems to drink, and will use the money saved for upgrades to water infrastructure.

Sophomore Greg Johnsen, associate director of SEED, also mentioned that the state could save scarce budget money by not purchasing bottled water.

“I would expect a fairly positive response considering the budget concerns right now,” Johnsen said. “It seems like it would make sense from so many standpoints that it seems like something the governor might want to do.”

But the state government doesn’t have any contracts with bottled-water corporations, and each department uses its own budget to purchase bottled water if needed, said Steve Valandra, spokesman for the Washington State Department of General Administration.

Despite this, Umhey stressed that the movement is just getting started and ultimately she would like to see a UW campus free of bottled water, especially considering Seattle’s recent push to get residents to drink tap water.

“I’d love to work on an effort in order to try and get bottled water out of our Housing and Food Services because we have public water on campus,” Umhey said. “We have clean drinking fountains. When there’s access to clean water, we should just keep continuing that access instead of making people pay for that access.”

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