Each time a student purchases a bottle of “Dirty Water” on this campus, they are sending a dollar to those who can drink nothing else.
The beverage sold to students isn’t as unsanitary as it sounds — it’s spring water “with a touch of tea,” according to the bottle. It is intended to symbolize the unsafe drinking water billions consume daily, according to senior finance major Jackie Vouthouris, who brought the product to the Maryland Food Co-op.
Vouthouris is the president and co-founder of the student group Quench, whose members started working on the issue of last semester.
The “Dirty Water” that went on sale at the co-op last week — $1.60 per bottle — is the group’s latest fundraising and awareness campaign, designed to pay for installing a new fresh-water well for schoolchildren in the developing world.
“The goal of Quench’s campaign is to raise awareness of the world water crisis and to inspire the University of Maryland to help alleviate this crisis for fellow students across the globe,” Vouthouris wrote in an e-mail.
Unsanitary drinking water is an issue students often overlook, Vouthouris said, but she hopes offering a product with an attention-grabbing name and an off-putting appearance might make them take notice.
“I’ve never heard anybody say that it’s not a great idea,” she said of Quench and its newest campaign, but added that a lot of the problem is the clean water movement doesn’t get the same hype as bigger charities, such as autism and breast cancer.
Slowly, the student organization is looking to reverse that trend, having raised more than $3,000 this academic year.
The Dirty Water, however, has so far represented a fraction of that total. Quench has sold 24 bottles to the co-op, raising just $24 toward the well project as of Sunday, but Vouthouris said that’s not a bad start.
“For four days you can’t really expect too much,” Vouthouris said. She added that she hopes the co-op will sell at least a few more cases in the coming weeks.
Some employees at the co-op remain skeptical that the drink will take off.
“We don’t carry a ton of it,” junior anthropology major Jonah Meyers said. “People are used to products we already carried.”
Quench also plans to sell Dirty Water at the Relay for Life fundraising race this weekend and at Maryland Day later this month.
A further component of the Dirty Water campaign, advertised on each bottle, asks those who buy it to drink only water until they can fill their emptied receptacle with the money they would have spent on other beverages.
The money-filled bottle would then go to LiquidWater.com, the international advocacy group that supplies Quench with its Dirty Water.
But Vouthouris said she has her doubts students will donate the additional money.
“I don’t think that’s really marketable on a college campus,” she said. “Any money that you would have spent on beer or coffee. … I just don’t see that happening.”
Staff writer Dana Cetrone contributed to this report. present@umdbk.com