WE SHOULD STOP DRINKING BOTTLED WATER
WE SHOULD STOP DRINKING BOTTLED WATER
No one needs bottled water. There are many good reasons why we should not leave our water reserves to companies that then sell us the water as a product.
Bottling tap water has long since become one of the most lucrative business models for food producers. Behind the Bonaqa brand, for example, lies ordinary drinking water that has been spiced up with minerals, not natural mineral water. This is why it may only be sold as table water in Germany and not as mineral water.
In other words: corporations make a profit from a publicly accessible good. To understand the problems that can be caused by selling off drinking water to industrial companies, it is worth looking at Canada.
In Canada, much of the bottled water comes from groundwater resources near the Great Lakes, where it is pumped out for 3.71 CAD per million litres by companies that later resell it at a huge profit margin. This region in particular is home to many indigenous communities whose inhabitants have not had access to their own fresh water source for decades, and whose bottled drinking water is trucked in by the ton. Of course, these bottles are produced by Nestlé and other large corporations.
Politicians and activists are demanding that the price paid by companies to be allowed to pump the water out of community areas must be raised. But some experts do not go far enough. They demand that the pumping of drinking water for profit should be banned in principle for social and scientific reasons. They are asking local governments to stop renewing the licence of key customer Nestlé.
"If we consider water to be a common good, Nestlé or Coca Cola would not actually be allowed to pump it out to be bottled and then sell it to us at a high price. It should be allowed to buy licenses to use water in a product-but water should not be the product itself," Stephen Scharper, professor of sustainability management at the University of Toronto, told Motherboard.
"In the end, such an approach would result in bottled water disappearing completely from the market," he concluded.
The commercial threat to water reserves
Harden Environmental Services, a groundwater testing company, stated in its latest report that Nestlé's water extraction in Canada has resulted in a pressure drop in some of the aquifers in the deposits. Such a pressure drop can have devastating consequences for water resources: The wells can dry up and pollutants from the region's wastewater treatment plants can spread to other areas and aquifers.
In view of the increasing problems with the supply of water to the population worldwide, this is not good news: In fact, every functioning well is likely to be more important than ever in the future, as the decline in water resources is now assuming dramatic proportions. Last year, NASA published data showing that about one third of the world's largest groundwater resources are acutely endangered. In view of the increasing periods of drought in many regions of the world as a result of climate change, we could actually make good use of these groundwater reserves, and there would be a strong case for government control of the reserves to ensure that water extraction does not backfire.
The water quality argument
But there is another argument that shows how absurd bottling water is: Wherever in the world there is effective, state-controlled water treatment, the quality of bottled water is generally no better than that of tap water. In 1999, for example, the American Natural Resources Defence Council produced a report showing that 25% of bottled water bottles had no quality difference at all with tap water.
A test conducted by the city of Cleveland in 2006 showed that bottled water of the Fiji brand even contained arsenic. In 2008, the European Environmental Working Group found out that some brands of bottled water were no different from tap water at all, and on the contrary, the level of pollutants even exceeded the legal limits in some cases.
The control argument
Finally, there is the advantage of regulation when the state is the supplier of drinking water: local authorities are legally obliged to make their annual reports on water quality publicly available, while industry is monitored by consumer protection organisations but not by environmental authorities.
Some manufacturers do publish quality reports, but in the past it has often been criticised that local authorities are bound tocompletely different standardsand that the industry in principle only checks itself.
Emergency care: A counter argument?
A disadvantage of the complete abolition of bottled drinking water, which is often pointed out, could be that plastic bottles, which can be transported quickly from A to B, can be a vital reserve in emergencies. The indigenous communities in Canada, for example, are still dependent on the water bottles until the problems with their water supply are solved. In Scharper's opinion, however, there is no reason why the bottling of the water could not be taken over by the public authorities.
"If municipal services do not work, that is by no means a reason why industry should benefit from them," said Scharper. "When basic human rights are neglected, the government must intervene. It can provide water from a municipal spring. You don't need industry as a middleman."
After all, we have already enforced serious bans in the past that affected the basis of our modern infrastructure. For example, after decades of studies on the harmful effects of asbestos, the use of the substance was banned in all buildings despite its popularity.
Another hard but effective example of drastic political change can be found in Paris. Here, all cars that are 20 years old or older have just been banned from the streets on weekdays to reduce air pollution.
There is also progress in terms of bottled water. Some cities have already started to gradually ban bottled water from supermarket shelves. In 2009, bottled water was even completely banned in Bundanoon, Australia. In San Francisco, it was decided two years ago to ban bottled water from public areas. So with enough political will, anything is possible. No one needs industrially bottled tap water.