Jane Olszewski, of Corporate Accountability International, watches as Joshua Miller, state senator and restaurant owner, tastes different bottled waters to see if he could tell the difference between them and tap water.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PROVIDENCE — The organizers of a national campaign battling corporate sales of bottled water lined up four glasses in front of Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline yesterday morning at the Local 121 restaurant on Washington Street. One was filled with Providence tap water, the others contained three popular brands of bottled water: Poland Spring, Aquafina and Dasani.

Cicilline took a sip of each one and shook his head.

“They are all delicious,” he said. “You can’t tell one from the other.”

“That’s just the point,” responded Deborah Lapidus, national organizer with the Think Outside the Bottle Campaign, a group targeting the corporations selling bottled water. Pepsi conceded last summer that its Aquafina is filtered tap water, she said, and that is fueling the criticism of big corporations charging the public exorbitant prices for water available to anyone for free.

Cicilline and the owners of five local restaurants announced yesterday that they are joining national efforts to curb the use of bottled water.

The owners of Providence establishments Local 121, Benders Caffe, the Hot Club, Trinity Brewhouse and the Garden Grille in Pawtucket announced that they will offer customers tap water, not bottled water.

Cicilline said he will sign an executive order on Tuesday phasing out the use of single-serve plastic water bottles in city government. Some larger bottles will be allowed in some buildings where the pipes are old, he said.

Last summer, Cicilline co-sponsored a resolution by the U.S. Conference of Mayors calling on local governments to phase out spending on bottled water. Concerns about a global water crisis and water privatization are behind the recently released, award-winning documentary film Flow: For the Love of Water and the book Water Consciousness, both of which lay blame for the crisis on the bottled water industry.

Cicilline said at a news conference yesterday that bottled water costs 1,000 to 10,000 times more than tap water, but some 25 percent of the bottled brands are simply tap water, too.

Local governments spend $25 billion annually to supply tap water to the public, but he said Americans are spending another $11 billion annually on bottled water.

Cicilline said water bottles are one of the fastest-growing components of municipal waste.

Lapidus said that misleading advertising by water bottlers is raising unnecessary public doubts about the quality of tap water.

“The corporations are transforming water from a low-cost public resource to a high-priced luxury,” Lapidus said.

Joshua Miller, a state senator and owner of three of the restaurants joining the effort to curb the use of bottled water, said among the concerns are how much diesel fuel was used to transport the water, where it came from and what can be done with the empty bottles.

One of Miller’s restaurants makes beer, and he said you can’t make good beer without good water supplies. Providence, he said, has a great water system.

Another of his restaurants, Local 121, features local foods. Bringing in water from Colorado or Fiji doesn’t fit that theme, he said.

Chris Mathis, operations manager of Benders Caffe, said her restaurant recently became the first to be green-certified in the state. Restaurants can be as wasteful or as responsible as they choose to be, she said.

Earlier this year, a Providence company, Medport, offered an alternative to bottled water by designing and marketing a reusable bottle with its own water filter. It is available in many local stores under the brand name Fit & Fresh LivPURE.

In related developments, bottled water company executives met in Las Vegas last week to consider the industry’s future. And a business-oriented policy organization called the Competitive Enterprise Institute has launched its own Web site and campaign in defense of bottled water. It can be found at www.enjoybottledwater.org.

For more information on the anti-bottled water campaign, go to www.ThinkOutsideTheBottle.org.

plord@projo.com