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Fighting dirty: Bottled water battles back
photo by Steve and Sara Emry (Flickr CC)
As people start to get hip as to what a scam bottled water is, the bottled water industry is getting worried.
Bottled water wastes energy, pollutes and rips you off. What’s more, it is often less healthy than tap water.
Microbiologist Dr Sonish Azam of Ccrest Laboratories is quoted in an article in the Telegraph from May of 2010:
Heterotrophic bacteria counts in some of the bottles were found to be in revolting figures of one hundred times more than the permitted limit. Bottled water is not expected to be free from microorganisms but the [level] observed in this study is surprisingly very high.
As more people realize how useless bottled water is (outside of places with non potable water, etc.) this superfluous and harmful business should decline. And so the big water sellers are bringing out the big guns by hiring Pegasus PR, a powerful sleazy PR agency that also works for big pharma.
And yet sales continue to rise. In 2010, more than 2bn litres were consumed in the UK – 33 litres per person, a figure projected to rise to 40 litres by 2020. More than 40bn litres were sold last year in the US, in plastic bottles it took 17m barrels of oil to manufacture; the industry there is worth $22 billion a year and sales are increasing at a rate of 5.4 per cent annually.
–The Ecologist
In the meantime US universities like Harvard have banned bottled water on campus. Is this a proxy war of the ‘water wars’ fought predominantly in wealthy countries instead of developing ones? No, as it’s also being fought in poor nations. As access to bottled water grows, governments have less impetus to provide clean running water. And make no mistake, bottled water companies are no friends of the people.
From an opinion piece on OregonLive.com:
Water bottling companies have a proven business model. They come into areas that have a limited natural resource — water — with promises of jobs and prosperity. They privatize the resource so that it is no longer freely available to the locals, deplete it until there is no more profit to be had, then close up shop and move on to another community.
For more on this story, read this piece in The Ecologist and for more info on bottled water, please go here to watch Annie Leonard’s Story of Bottled Water.
Tags: bottled water
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this has been happening for years and years. i rember when my mom told me stories of when she was a little girl and she would swim in her county in alaskas fresh water lake. the waterfall feeding it was so pure, mom would drink from it. once she even tested it and it had only about 14 ppm! bottled water has a lot more! then one day a bottled water company came and told her that she couldnt swim there anymore. after about two years the entire quarter mile deep, half a mile across, one mile around lake was reduced to now wet mud and the waterfall was nolonger running. most of the animals died. and since there was only bottled water, thats all they could drink. my mom ended up moving to california and the same things would happen no matter where she moved georgia, puerto rico, washington, ect. we cant hide. we can only stop buying so they wont have the money to keep moving around sucking up all of our worlds reputaion. if you think about it, if you can control the water, you can control the world.
Privatizing any natural resource should be illegal in my opinion, but it’s obscene when it’s something like water. Everyone needs it and any firm claiming ownership of it has clearly stolen what they are selling and I don’t mean that selling all bottled water should be illegal, rather what happens with springs and water sources that communities depend on.
Privatizing water resources should be illegal! There are so many stories about how bad this turned out for the people who used to get their water from these natural resources and are now forced to turn to bottled water – if available – instead. I remember my grandfather getting is water for free from a spring every week, that too is long gone. We are in the middle of an unsustainable model and we can only guess where it will go from here. I’m a big advocate of tap water myself, but how long until this too becomes a very expensive resource to have access to?
People has always the tendency to over do things and that’s made us a very good victim for commercialism…companies will show how filthy potable water is just like how this coffee company has claimed that coffee has more anti-oxidant than green tea.
i live in the metropolis and I’ve never joined the band wagon of buying a purified water for delivery, I’m a tap water drinker…
sometimes it’s better to expose yourself from germs.. so your body could create anti-bodies than to play neat and safe all the time, that’s boring….