Gerardo Vallen and Lorenzo de Rita are the founders of the non-profit organization Join the pipe. Millions of people have no safe drinking water while the Western world is drinking out of plastic bottles instead of tap water from the crane. Plastic bottles are often not recycled and therefore not very sustainable. Vallen and De Rita started with selling tap water to establish water pumps in regions where they lack drinking water. The ultimate goal is to give everyone access to safe drinking water. 

If you realize that we spill 70 liters of drinking water every day due to flushing toilets etc., while other countries are suffering from a lack of safe drinking water, something is wrong. This contradiction was forming the basis for the ‘Join the pipe’ initiative. According to the Red Cross, 5000 children die every day due to contaminated drinking water and nearly one billion people lack access to safe water. The ’Join the pipe’ initiative underlines the upcoming sustainability trend at consumers and producers. Vallen contributes: ‘In the US, tap water is becoming more popular because bottled water is more expensive, and there isn’t much taste difference’. 

In several restaurants the trendy Join the pipe carafes can be already ordered. These carafes contain normal tap water and on the bottom there are the coordinates of the location of the water pump to which you are contributing. On google maps you then can find the location. Besides this, a social community is created and thousands of people already joined the initiative. The initiative helped over 10.000 people with safe drinking water. Therefore we say: get rid of the plastic bottles and join the longest water pipeline in the world.

see: www.jointhepipe.org