New campaign urges N.W.T. residents to drop bottled water

N.W.T.'s drinking water is often touted as some of the best in the world and a new campaign by a local environmental group is encouraging Northwest Territories residents to turn on their taps and stop buying bottled water.

The Ecology North-sponsored campaign #loveNWTwater kicked off earlier this month.

Brenda Van Hauvart, Ecology North's water specialist, says according to the organization's research, 24 bottled water retailers, which serve 53 locations, sold more than 1.3 million bottles containing 1.8 million litres of water in N.W.T. between 2014 and 2015. According to Van Hauvart, about 200,000 of those bottles ended up in a landfill.

"Those bottles are shipped from southern cities so that's a lot of money that goes into that, transportation, greenhouse gas emissions... those bottles once they're used they end up in the community landfill," she said.

Van Hauvart says they are asking residents to take a one-year pledge through their website to stop drinking bottled water. They also plan to reach out to local businesses, and set up campaign booths during public events.

She says residents can also do the water tasting challenge.

"It is a fun game to see if you can taste the difference between bottled water and tap water."

She says they will also work with community governments to encourage them to go bottled-water-free.

"In the territory we're so fortunate to have good quality and good drinking water in all 33 communities, so we wanted to do something about that and pull up all these efforts," she says.

"We all love N.W.T. water."

Monitoring tap water

There are 29 water treatment plants in the territory that serve the 33 municipalities. The K'atl'odeeche First Nation, Enterprise and Kakisa receive trucked water from Hay River and Dettah receives water from Yellowknife.

Eleanor Young, deputy minister for the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, says MACA trains local water treatment plant operators and assists communities to build water treatment plants while Health and Social Services conducts regular tests and analyzes the results to ensure drinking water regulations are met.

"The Department of Health requires testing for 28 parameters as well as the presence of bacteria...as well as tests for chlorine and turbidity," she says.

Young says local operators test the water and send it to HSS. She says if there are any issues about water safety, the local or regional environmental health officer will notify the community.

The 2015 Water Quality Summary, an annual report that looks at if water treatment plant operators are doing all of the mandatory testing, identified several communities that fell short. 

"In a case where you see lower percentages of compliance ... in most cases it's not that tests aren't happening but a couple of things can happen," say Young.

"If the tests don't get on a plane and get out to the lab, the water can only be held for so long before it's no longer valid to be tested. And sometimes it's logging the tests results, where they get recorded and put into the system."

Young says it's rare any that any water treatment plant would go significant periods without testing. She says there might be situations where someone is sick and there are no backup operators, so a day or two of testing might be missed.

Young says MACA has began installing remote monitoring equipment in some of the plants to monitor their performance.