Earlier this week, in an article in The Age the head of the Australasian Bottled Water Institute called the decision by the Victorian College of Arts to ban the sale of water on campus…wait for it… “stupid.”

Hold on a minute! Bottled Water Institute?! Is that like one of those shonky research bodies put together by the tobacco companies to promote the health benefits of smoking? Sure as heck sounds like it.

Anyway, we digress.

”If they are serious about reducing their environmental footprint, they probably need to ban soft drinks and coffee and just about every other commercial beverage other than bottled water, which has one of the lowest environmental footprints of any beverage,” Mr Parker said.

Unbelievable! We just have to call bullshit on this one. Sorry mate… unlike water, coffee and soft drinks don’t flow freely from the tap.

A quick little scout around The Age’s own website reveals a number of facts:

• Bottled water is more expensive than petrol; if you could turn petrol into water, you could make money.
• The total amount of energy required for every bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling a quarter of the bottle with crude oil.
• In addition to the water in bottles, twice as much water is used in the production process. Which means: every litre sold represents a jaw dropping two litres of water used to bring that water to market.

We’re so fortunate in this part of the world that we have really high quality, pure drinkable H2O piped to all of our houses and offices that it just seems ridiculous that we’re bottling water in crappy, thin plastic bottles riddled with Bisphenol A (really, it’s bad news!), carting them around in trucks, buying them at a ridiculous mark-up before at best recycling or at worst turfing them into landfill or the ocean… when we could simply be re-filling our own bottles!

We’re happy to announce, then, that we’ve just begun stocking the JoinThePipe water bottles in our AU stores.

Recently introduced to Australia by two of the guys that brought us Movember, it’s a worldwide initiative started in a Holland a couple of years ago that’s founded on the simple ideas that:

• Bottled water is wasteful.
• We have great tap water almost everywhere in the developed world.
• Billions of people in the Third World have limited access to drinking water and that’s a terrible problem facing humanity.

The Join The Pipe project neatly takes these three ideas and overlaps them like some kinda freaky Venn diagram: by selling a range of six great looking, functional water bottles and establishing a network of refilling points across the globe we can eliminate all the waste associated with bottled water and from each $29.95 water bottle sold we make a $7.50 donation to supporting water projects in the Third World.

And the bottles themselves? They’re super cool. Created in collaboration with the Dutch design agency DwarsOntwerp, they come in six different varieties from the straight-up-and-down pipe style to the freaky deaky Y joiner pipe. They’re BPA free, impact resistant and dishwasher safe and they look great.

We’re now selling them in all our Australian stores (and online at Nation State) and if you bring one in—or, indeed, any water bottle—we’ll happily fill them up for you!* We’re also pleased to say that we’re rolling back the sale of bottle water from our stores—as of today, there will be no bottled water sold in our Elizabeth Street stores and the others will soon be following suit.

Bottled water sucks. Buy a re-useable bottle, fill it up and help build wells in the Third World.

* With the exception of our Sydney store in which we don’t have proper plumbing. It’s a long story.