Venice Tap Water: A Scalable Model for Refill Culture in High-Tourism Cities

Venice is a city built on water, yet bottled-water consumption continues to create unnecessary packaging, transport and waste-management pressures. Although Venice’s tap water is safe, drinkable and strictly controlled, many residents and visitors still choose bottled water because of limited information, commercial habits and uneven access to clearly identified, functioning public fountains. This 60-minute online session presents Venice Tap Water, an initiative established in 2019 that combines public-data mapping, multilingual communication, participatory monitoring and tourism outreach to make refill the easier and more trusted choice. Participants will learn how the project mapped more than 240 public drinking fountains, monitored their operating status and water-flow capacity, and developed an interactive multilingual map that has received more than one million views. The session will also present practical communication materials created for visitors and accommodation providers and explain how community reports help keep fountain information current. The event will connect everyday water choices with wider climate action. Increasing the use of existing public-water infrastructure can reduce demand for single-use packaging and the associated transport, storage, collection and treatment of bottled water. It can also improve equitable access to drinking water and help cities respond to increasingly hot and crowded urban conditions. The session will conclude with a discussion about how this low-cost and replicable model could be adapted to New York and other high-tourism cities through partnerships involving municipalities, water utilities, tourism organizations, accommodation providers and local communities.