Oh. My.

Tappening has got to be the best flipping anti-bottled water campaign ever created. Tappening was covered at the New York Times last year but I just learned about them today at elephant.

Tappening targets bottled water companies with a simple tactic – they lie about them. One of their posters claims “Bottled Water: 98% Melted Ice Caps. 2% Polar Bear Tears” and another reads, “Bottled Water is the Primary Cause of Restless Leg Syndrome.” My favorite poster is the puppy poster though. I think it should be on an organic shirt that I could wear all the time!

Another good poster…

Now, in case your morals are in a bunch over Tappening keep in mind that they based their idea to lie directly on the fact that water bottle companies lie continually. Tap water is almost always safe, but the bottled water companies would hate for you to figure that out. So they lie. They tell you bottled water is safer, but really it’s not.

All the posters clearly protect themselves by stating, “If bottled water companies can lie, we can too,”

I love it.

Start your own lie about bottled water!

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water was released in April, but being me, I’m just now hearing about it. Good golly. IF I only had the time to read all the books I wanted to read.

Basically this book looks like everything I’ve known for a long time – there’s a cool Q&A with author Peter H. Gleick posted you can check out. You can get the gist of the problem of bottled water by reading the following posts:

• Time to stop buying bottled water!
• Last year I spent hundreds on bottled water!

That said, if you’re looking to stop explaining when people ask you why you don’t drink bottled water, well, this book sounds like it could be your go-to guide.

From the publisher; Island Press:

Peter Gleick knows water. A world-renowned scientist and freshwater expert, Gleick is a MacArthur Foundation “genius,” and according to the BBC, an environmental visionary. And he drinks from the tap. Why don’t the rest of us?

Bottled and Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last one hundred years—and why we are poorer for it. It’s a big story and water is big business. Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottle of water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one of those bottles away. That adds up to more than thirty billion bottles a year and tens of billions of dollars of sales.

Are there legitimate reasons to buy all those bottles? With a scientist’s eye and a natural storyteller’s wit, Gleick investigates whether industry claims about the relative safety, convenience, and taste of bottled versus tap hold water. And he exposes the true reasons we’ve turned to the bottle, from fearmongering by business interests and our own vanity to the breakdown of public systems and global inequities.

“Designer” H2O may be laughable, but the debate over commodifying water is deadly serious. It comes down to society’s choices about human rights, the role of government and free markets, the importance of being “green,” and fundamental values. Gleick gets to the heart of the bottled water craze, exploring what it means for us to bottle and sell our most basic necessity.

I can’t wait to read it – I’m hoping there are some new awesome facts included. For now, also see…

• Ten cool BPA-free reusable water bottles for kids + bonus art bottle
• Ten BPA-free reusable water bottles for adults

You don’t have to spend a lot of green on cool eco-friendly summer toys. You, along with your kids can make a whole slew of eco-friendly toys all on your own, with low-cost eco-friendly or recycled materials. Following are 20 eco-fun, summer toy projects.

• Really neat rock dominoes (shown above) – one of those I can’t believe I didn’t think of that ideas.
• Make a recycled Cardboard Playhouse like the one shown above from Make Baby Stuff, then break out the non-toxic art supplies and let your little one decorate to her heart’s content.
• If you’ve got some tools and are good with wood you can make a working wooden boom crane that little kids will love.
• Kool-Aid dyed play silks – kids love play silks. You can toss them up, use them as doll clothing, use them for dress up fun, or fly around the yard with them swooshing behind you. You can find inexpensive silks at thrift stores OR silk material which takes a little more work because you’ll have to cut the material and mend them, but no big. If you don’t want to use Kool-aid try dying the silks with some homemade juice dye (made from plants).
• Organic finger paint – not freakishly bright, but non-toxic subtle paints you can make with the kids.
• Flying fun with a super slick recycled cardboard origami hang glider.
• Build a Bubble-Powered Rocket – with recycled paper, TUMS and film canisters. This rocket actually lifts off.
• Nine amazing DIY play kitchens and one totally hip homemade oven!

• Seriously amazing homemade baby blocks (shown above)! Use scrap wood or sustainable wood and non-toxic paint
• Start saving toilet paper tubes now and by mid summer you’ll have enough to build a toilet paper tube playhouse. Use non-toxic glue and duct tape to create your playhouse.
• Excellent collection of old-fashioned, handmade toys from Mother Earth News.
• The Perfect Dollhouse: A homemade miniature villa from Family Fun. It’s a tiny, completely custom, recycled dollhouse box. Tidy enough to slide right under the bed. So creative that it’ll be a hit all summer. The sky is really the limit with this project. You probably have tons of recycled bits around the house that will work for this cool project.
• Toy boats made with recycled blocks.
• Make a butterfly house.
• Future directors will adore making a homemade movie wheel – be sure to use recycled paper.
• 100% awesome recycled cereal box houses.
• For baby fun and learning make a beautiful soft book of colors with fabric scraps.
• Got summer pixies? Make some creative homemade fairy wings that your little one can decorate and fly with all summer long.
• Homemade puppet theater – then add some sock puppets.
• After hours and hours of Zelda, I’m pretty sure my son Cedar would faint dead away if I made him this sweet grappling hook – not for irresponsible kids though.

[images via Martha Stewart]

Last year or so I saw a study that looked at how many people buy bottled water for drinking at home, and what it costs them. The results were insane. There are folks paying up to $8 per gallon for water!

Are you guilty of spending far too much on bottle water? If you’re only buying bottled water, you just might be, even if you’re getting your H2O on sale. Not to mention all those plastic bottles made with non-renewable oil. Beyond the petroleum and energy needed to make plastic, consider the gas it takes to transport water to stores from the factories. Now you’re looking at scads of gasoline waste; it’s crazy. Also consider how much BPA you’re getting when you use plastic water bottles – more than you might think.

On top of the oil issue, research shows that most people toss their bottles into the landfill vs. recycling their plastic bottles. Only about 27% of people recycle their plastic water bottles. Even if you do recycle, it takes lots of energy to make plastic water bottles and more energy to recycle them. All in all plastic disposable water bottles are a huge drain on the earth.

Your most eco-friendly beverage choice

Tap water. Tap water is by far the greenest beverage you can drink – obviously it’s natural and free from things like weird colors and chemical flavors. It’s not 100% cheap, but it is less expensive than bottled water.

Most tap water is safe

We’ve been taught to think that water is not safe unless it’s filtered but this is simply not true. In fact, you can check your town’s water for safeness. Visit the EPA’s Safewater to find out if your drinking water is safe straight from the tap.

A slight chlorine taste in tap water is normal but not dangerous and can be eliminated by filling a pitcher and leaving your water to sit for a day or two. If plain water is boring to you, so you’ve been buying bottled flavored water, you can add a slice of lime, lemon, or other citrus to a pitcher of water to liven it up.

What if your tap water is not safe?

Some tap water is questionable – as in really not safe or maybe you’re just paranoid (even if your water report says your water is safe) in either of these cases you need to go to a second best option.

Option 2 – water delivery. This may be your greenest option after tap water. It costs a lot and of course delivery water uses gasoline resources, but the bottles are used again and again vs. most water filters which are used and tossed.

Option 3 – water filters. Most water filters aren’t that green. Few can be recycled and they’re all packed up in major excess packaging. That said, filters are still a better, greener choice than bottled. Consider an under the sink water filtration system over a tap filter (the filters last longer and can cost less in the long run). After a dedicated home filter consider Brita. Brita Brita Water Pitchers can be recycled.

One downside is that Brita Water Pitcher Replacement Filter are expensive. A second downside is that Brita is part of the Clorox family (I’m not a Clorox fan – I hate wanna-be green companies who still produce toxic chemicals) but still, helps you recycle while other filter companies don’t so I’d likely buy a Brita water pitcher with filter over some other company’s filter. Check out Brita’s Filter for Good program for more details.

Option 4 continue to buy bottled water. NOT a good green choice. If you really feel the need to buy bottled water you need to recycle the bottles and you need to recycle the caps separately – plastic water bottles and plastic water bottle caps are different breeds of plastic.

Just stuck on the bottle?

If you’re simply addicted to the bottle, not the bottled water itself, try a reusable, BPA-free water bottle. Fill it up with tap water. Heck, you can even pretend the bottle is plastic if you like – but now you won’t have any real green guilt!

Now, you tell me. Is you family drinking tap water this summer?

Ok, maybe I didn’t spend hundreds on bottled water. However, my taxes (of which I had plenty) did help pay for bottled water even though technically I didn’t drink ONE sip of bottled water in 2009. Or the year before that come to think.

You are in the same boat as me.

Even if you kicked the bad non-reusable bottled water habit long ago you’re still most likely supporting other folks’ bottled water addiction.

According to an analysis by EWG partner Corporate Accountability International (CAI), most states are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bottled drinking water for state employees. Of course this is not eco-friendly plus doesn’t make great use of our tax dollars. Worst of all, having all that bottled water on hand doesn’t exactly motivate public officials to take a real interest in supporting safe, strong and healthy public water systems – why should they? We’re paying for their bottled water what do they care if the water system is good or bad.

Actually I find this highly ironic since most bottled water is pretty much tap water.

According to Enviroblog it’s not all bad news – some states are breaking the bottled water habit and saving money. Enviroblog, for example, notes that “San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom passed an executive order that phases out city spending on bottled water and invests the recouped funds in the city’s public water system. As a result, the city is saving $500,000 a year simply by not buying bottled water.”

To learn more about bottled water use in your state check out Think Outside the Bottle where community members and public officials can download guides about the issue and learn how to make bottled water go away (as it should).

Sorry that I’ve been MIA. I have only a one word excuse – TAXES. Technically that would be DARN TAXES. I’ve been seriously considering moving out of the country. But, I digress. In other April news, Earth Day is coming up fast but there’s still time to jump on board with one awesome Earth Day event; the Earth Day Groceries Project.

Bags from the Kids Care Club at Challenge Charter School in Glendale, AZ

The Earth Day Groceries Project is always a super fun event and a great simple project that allows kids to directly get involved with Earth Day and make a difference.

The Earth Day Groceries Project is an easy, 100% free environmental awareness project that partners youth with local grocers to help spread important messages related to Earth Day. To participate, teachers or parents simply borrow paper grocery bags from a local grocery store. Kids can then decorate the bags with environmental messages about reuse, recycling, wildlife or whatever other Earth Day message suits them. Then kids return the bags to the grocery store, and on Earth Day customers receive their groceries— along with the message that kids care about our environment— in the decorated bags.

Bag from Chapman Hill Elementary in Salem, OR

How to get involved:

If you’d like to participate Earth Day Groceries Project offers these four simple steps to getting started:

1. Borrow Paper Bags. Contact a local grocery store that uses paper grocery bags. See if the manager will let you “borrow” enough bags so that each student in your school can decorate one. Let the manager know about the project and its environmental education message, of course!

2. Decorate Paper Bags. Have students decorate the bags with the name of their school, friendly environmental messages, pictures of the earth, or a favorite natural resource. Make them into works of art!

3. Deliver Paper Bags. Before Earth Day (April 22) return the decorated bags to your grocery store (with many thanks to the manager!). On Earth Day, shoppers receive their groceries–along with the message that kids care about our environment– in the decorated bags.

4. Report Your Participation. Log on to the project’s website and fill out the short report form, so your bags will count toward the international tally. Each school’s report will be automatically included in a Random Drawing for a free Prize Package for your school and students.

What you get (besides a happy fuzzy warm feeling):

“You can download a Certificate of Participation after registering your report. Your groups’ report and photos will be featured on the site, and your bags will be added to this year’s national tally. If you contact your local media, you may get some press coverage too. And don’t forget the reward of being part of an international effort to promote environmental awareness!”

You don’t have to be a school to participate. Many schools do participate each year from elementary to middle schools, but any gathered kiddos will do – the more the better. Homeschoolers, unschoolers, church groups, day care centers, 4H clubs, girl scouts, playgroups or neighborhoods could try this event as well. Basically, if you have a pack of kids, you’re good to go.

Hopefully one day we won’t even need the Earth Day Groceries Project; hopefully one day everyone will use reusable bags and everyone will care about the planet without being urged by kids, but until then this is a excellent opportunity for kids to participate in a killer creative Earth Day event.

Learn more:

• Earth Day Groceries Project
• Project starter kit
• See example of bags on The Earth Day Groceries Project Flickr page
• Earth Day Groceries Project Blog
• Join them on Facebook
• Follow them on Twitter

The most ambitious step when it comes to egg packaging is to skip it altogether. However unless you have your own chickens and can thus ‘grow’ organic eggs or have an excellent farmer’s market that sells bulk eggs (which you can place in a basket to purchase) you will have to deal with packaging. That said, your first step should be to buy organic eggs that come in easy to recycle packaging. Avoid those icky old Styrofoam egg cartons at all costs.

After making sure you get eggs in recyclable packaging you can still reuse the cartons a few times before you recycle. Here are 16 ways to reuse your egg cartons.

1. Seed starters.
2. Concrete slabs for the garden.
3. Paint trays – these are excellent for this because kids get lots of space to mix different paint colors up.
4. Totally AMAZING fairy lights – swoon!
5. Organize any old small item. Nails, earring, marbles, tacks, and so on. This list goes on and on.
6. Compost them.
7. Use a tool to get little kids to eat. If I were you, I’d make sure the cartons are spotless though, because leftover egg bacteria makes me a little nervous.
8. Make some adorable tulips or cute little bugs for the upcoming spring.
9. Create a recycled bulletin board.
10. Egg carton made stools – ok, this is a cheat because you’re not likely to make them, still it’s pretty cool.
11. A super fun egg carton camera.
12. I’ve heard around (more than once) that you can use egg cartons as wall insulation – say if you have noisy neighbors or a basement rock band. However, I’ve never tried this myself, and heard from a pal that they can cut echoes but not necessarily loud sounds so please test run this first if you’re going to make a lot of noise drumming or what have you.
13. Make an insanely cool outdoor table that eats itself. No joke.
14. Make a Mancala egg carton game – my son loves Mancala!
15. I also recently saw a pretty slick journal made with reclaimed egg cartons. You could probably make one yourself.
16. Dollhouse furniture – in this craft project the blogger used styrofoam cartons, but I think your furniture would look great made with cardboard cartons too.

I bet you can think of a lot of other projects too. Such as…?