Take Back the Tap to hold kick-off for Tap-A-Palooza event Oct. 3
Tap-A-Palooza, a month-long awareness event, hosted by the campus organization, Take Back the Tap (TBTT), will give students the opportunity to attend campus events and participate in a nationwide competition.
A kick-off presentation will take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 3, in Anspach Hall, room 151. The event is open to all CMU students and will feature a presentation of what to expect throughout the month.
Every day in October, TBTT will ask CMU students to text “I < 3 Tap” to 69866, as well as send an additional follow-up text with their student email address. Doing so counts as a pledge towards eliminating bottled water. Each pledge gets TBTT closer to winning a nationwide competition put on by Food and Water Watch.
The school with the most pledges at the end of October will receive $1,500 towards rebuilding their public water infrastructure. There are currently 20 other schools who plan to participate in the competition.
“A win would show the administration we have student support and students actually care about this issue – that we believe people should have safe and affordable drinking water," said TBTT president Allison LaPlatt. "It would be huge for our organization to have that money to go towards something important, like building a water infrastructure,."
TBTT is a campaign run through the non-profit Food and Water Watch. The national campaign spans over 200 university campuses that all share the same goal of preventing the sale of single-use plastic water bottles for environmental, health and economical reasons. Plastic bottled water creates lasting waste in landfills and can leech chemicals into the water if heated.
