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The Bottled Water Industry - Threatening the Human Right to Water The Corporate Cover Up
Bottled water corporations have sold people a bill of goods — positioning bottled water as healthy, when in reality it threatens our health and our ecosystems, costs thousands of times what tap water costs, and undermines local democratic control over a common resource. Water bottling is one of the least regulated industries in the US — much less regulated than our public tap water. Scientific studies even show that bottled water is no safer than tap water, and can sometimes be less safe, containing elevated levels of arsenic, bacteria and other contaminants. Bottled water also leaves a carbon footprint:
To put it another way, the entire energy costs of the lifecycle of a bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling up a quarter of each bottle with oil (Source: Pacific Institute). Bottled water corporations directly impact local communities. Bottling plants operated by these water giants are springing up across the US and around the world. Bottlers extract water in huge amounts from local springs and aquifers, potentially drying up wells and springs or depleting wetlands and draining rivers, with serious impacts on the ecosystems. If these corporations are not draining local water supplies, the water bottlers take it directly from our public tap water systems — more than one-quarter of bottled water sold comes from municipal supplies. These corporations use political and economic clout to secure sweetheart deals, block legislative efforts to secure local control and pursue costly and time-consuming litigation against individuals and governments.
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Challenge City Spending on Bottled Water Take the Think Outside the Bottle Pledge Tap Water Challenge Organizing Kit |
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Nowhere is the corporate water-grab more insidious than the exploding corporate control of our drinking water. Throughout the world, some of the most powerful corporations are privatizing our public water systems and resources, reducing our right to water into simply another opportunity to profit.
Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year - and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide (Source: Pacific Institute).
