Green Corps organizers educated citizens about the abuses of the bottled water industry through Corporate Accountability International's Think Outside the Bottle Campaign.

Since 2006, Green Corps organizers have been at the forefront of a national campaign to protect public water systems. With Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign, organizers have been putting pressure on the corporations that profit from turning water into a commodity. Bottled water corporations market their product as a healthy choice, but research shows that the product is no safer than our public tap water systems, costs thousands of times more, and undermines local control over a common resource. And ecologically, bottled water is a massive problem: it takes over 15 million barrels of oil (enough for 1 million cars for a year) to make plastic water bottles.

To raise awareness of the issue, Green Corps organizers conducted “Tap Water Challenges” in cities nationwide, asking citizens to judge bottled water against tap water in a head-to-head taste test. These events, in conjunction with World Water Day educational forums, generated a flood of media coverage, including the Today Show and NBC Nightly News. Rallying the support of hundreds of citizen activists, Green Corps organizers convinced the mayor of San Francisco to cancel the city government’s bottled water contract and the mayor of Austin to issue a city-wide audit on bottled water costs. The mayors of Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Boston, and other cities have already endorsed a pledge to support public water over bottled.