I think it’s from Brita. It’s a great commercial. I would love to insert the video right here, but I couldn’t find it.

So we are getting rid of the bottled water in our branches. It was a tough decision – made slightly easier by our Mayor’s initiative to outlaw water bottles in the city of Seattle.

We are doing it for a couple of reasons 1. to simplify our processes – you’d be amazed at how cumbersome it was to store, distribute, order and stock those bottles of water. 2. to reduce the expenses of the credit union – branded water was not cheap. 3. to be gentler on our environment.

We want to get rid of the water, but we don’t want to make our members mad. Many people have complained about the water going away. We decided to put the water coolers from our employee break room out in our lobbies so people can still quench their thirst whilst doing their banking.

But now we are wrestling with a few new things.

Like cups.

So we have these left over cups from a long time ago. They are orange, and plastic and they say Verity. They are not very green – in any usage of the word.

But we bought lots of them before we saw An Inconvenient Truth.

It’s not really green to throw them away. But it looks kind of odd to have them out in the lobby with a sign saying we’ve done away with our bottled water as move towards sustainability.

What’s a company to do?

There is also the question of where we are getting our water coolers. There is a company that we can use that is closer than the vendor we are currently using, but it might be more expensive. Do members want us spending our money in this way? I don’t know. I really don’t.

The point of this rambling post is to let you know that Verity branded water is gone and some water coolers are in their place. We know the orange cups we are currently providing are not environmentally friendly. We are working on getting some bio-cups. We are also wrestling with the cost versus impact of all of these decisions.

If you have any opinions, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks.