Last week in the US it was the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) National Drinking Water Week. The purpose is to drive awareness of drinking water but also to promote the drinking of tap water versus bottled water.

Certainly the US is beginnning to wake up the the idea that maybe bottled water isn't the way to go in the future.  Last week it was reported that New York government offices were banning bottled water and bottled water coolers in an attempt to reduce costs and their carbon footprint.

Hopefully we will see this trend gaining some momentum and it will push through our culture here in Melbourne and Australia.

Some of the statistics from the EPA are incredible:

In 2006 the US consumed 50 billion bottles of water, of which 38 billion bottles ended up in landfill sitting for thousands of years. The EPA estimates that it took 912 million gallons (that's 3.4 billion litres) of oil to make and transport those bottles.