Above Photo: Tap Project volunteer looking for participating restaurants.

We spent a couple of days walking around encouraging restaurants and coffeehouses to get involved. Four restaurants and two coffeehouses have agreed to participate. This is the first year of the Tap Project in our area. Restaurants are a great venue to reach a diverse group of people. The campaign might present the opportunity for someone in the United States to think about a young child in Zambia (or Bangladesh, India, Sudan… ) and their lack of water and/or sanitation. And, with the UNICEF Tap Project, we are giving people the chance to help alleviate the suffering of children worldwide.

If you want to engage your city in the Tap Project, visit the UNICEF Tap Project website at www.tapproject.org.

The book will address questions such as:

“Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles?”

For more information on bottled water, see the new Water Page on AlterNet. Tara Lohan, managing editor of AlterNet, has written several articles on the negative implications of bottled water in our world including This Year Give Up Bottle Water for Lent and What Would You Say to Coke’s Executives? (a review of ” a pioneering campaign that gives new meaning to message in a bottle“).

See the Water Books Page at the top of this web-log for more books on water.