Bottled water is used by millions of people around the world, because they think it’s safer than tap water. There is less than one person, according to the Food and Drug Administration, regulating the entire multibillion-dollar bottled water industry in the United States. That means that that poor person does multiple things, and one of them is water. The Food and Drug Administration, if you ask them what’s in any brand of bottled water, they’ll say, “We have no idea.”
Why would people pay such a premium for bottled water?
Three-out-of-four Americans drink bottled water, and one-in-five will only drink bottled water. And water is something we already pay for.
Leading brands are basically tap water, often sold for more than the cost of gasoline.
A new documentary examines the global water crisis and takes on the issue of bottled water. It’s called FLOW: For Love of Water. Irena Salina is the director of FLOW.
The Democratic and Republican conventions, brought to you by Pepsi and Coke. Pepsi Center is where the coronation for the Democrats took place, and Coca-Cola was everywhere on those delegate bags. Coca-Cola was one of the official sponsors of recent Olympics, in China. You couldn’t bring water, even your own bottled water, in. You had to only—you could only get Coca-Cola water. How many bottles of Coke water were thrown away and to add to the pollution in China?
This is part of the movement towards creating a global cartel of water, kind of like we have a global cartel of energy, where, the day may come—and people are resisting it very hard, so it may not; but that every drop of water will be spoken for privately by a corporation, whether it’s bottled water, utilities, the service of, delivery of your water, recycling, desalination—nanotechnology is the latest. At every phase, water will be corporately owned, because we are a planet running out of fresh, clean water, which doesn’t sound right, because we all learned back in grade six that can’t happen, but it is happening. And the demand’s going like that, and the supply’s going like that, down.
And if we don’t understand this really soon, we’re going to find that corporations understand it much better than we do. They’re moving in to take control of water. Coke and Pepsi, by the way, are under a great deal of criticism and resistance around the world, and so they’re trying very hard to build their name through things like the two conventions, through giving money to schools and that kind of thing, through building pipes in Africa so poor people can access water, because, really, their story is one of going into communities around the world with Nestle, which is the other big bottled water conglomerate, and just removing people’s water rights. So they’re fighting back.
50 billion gallons of water in plastic bottles around the world. Almost all of it, all but about five percent, did not get recycled around the world.
in North America or Europe now—it’s beginning to spread to other parts of the world—there is an anti-bottled water movement, and it’s a very powerful movement. We’re getting restaurants and city councils. In Canada, there is a raft of municipalities and school boards passing, anti- or bottled-water-free zones.
Why bottled water is bad?
first of all, it’s the corporate takeover of water, and it makes people think that what comes out of their tap doesn’t matter. So you’re not going to be prepared to keep your taxes going for infrastructure repair. And that’s the most important thing, is clean, accessible, safe public water.
Secondly, it’s polluting. Massive amounts of plastic, massive amounts of energy used in the creation and transportation of bottled water, CO2 emissions. And it’s also quite poisonous. I mean, the plastic itself leaks chemicals. People say, “Well, I got a great deal at Wal-Mart on my water.” “Why do you think you got a great deal? It’s been sitting there for six months. You should not be drinking it.” And it’s unregulated. And it’s less safe than your good, clean, safe tap water, which is what needs to be the goal here.
if New Yorkers were to quit bottle of water for one week, they would save 24 million bottle of plastic in landfills.
FLOW is a journey. it started from an article in The Nation in 2001. It basically said, “Who owns water?” It implied, is water going to be the next oil of the twenty-first century? And Maude and Tony Clarke had written the article. Who owns water around the world, and as well as transparent pollution, which is things in our water that we absolutely have no idea about it, just like an herbicide, for example, in the United States that is spread all over the Corn Belt that is called atrazine, and that has been banned for approximately ten years all over Europe—not just one little village in Europe, all over Europe. They have found that it changes it’s an endocrine disruptor. Some cancers are close to it. And even though it’s been banned in Europe for ten years, they still find traces of it in the water ten years later.
Syngenta is a Swiss company which makes this poison. And they’re one of the leaders now in ethanol. So it gives you an idea of—it’s not just the United States, where it’s going; it’s worldwide. it’s being spread in forests in Australia. In South Africa, it was used, but they phased out of it.
thirst and drought and dying and death in the Global South, there they’ve done there is everything wrong. With removal of water from watersheds, the continued pollution, not putting money into infrastructure, privatization of water into this—a private right, so that they—what they call unbundled water from the land. And you can actually sell the water away from the land, which is exactly the wrong thing to be doing. And now big pools of international investors are coming along and buying up water rights, happening here with T. Boone Pickens and others in Texas and California, where the notion of water as a property, as a private commodity, is allowing people to buy it, horde it, sell it, even bequeath it. And it’s a mistake. There are going to be refugees from Australia going to New Zealand and North America and so on.
T. Boone Pickens didn’t make enough money, out of energy, so he’s now buying up water rights, and he is going to build a pipeline and is buying up the property that he will need for this pipeline to transport water that he’s going to sell. And he’s holding onto it until it’s worth even more money than it’s worth now, so when blue gold may be blue platinum. He is also starting wind projects. It’s all connected, because the wind project is very connected to his water pipeline that he wants to build. And he’s trying to green himself, but you can’t green yourself by privatizing water.
Maude Barlow and Irena Salina talking with Amy Goodman
Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians, founder of the Blue Planet Project, author of sixteen books, including Blue Gold. Her latest is called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
Irena Salina. Director of FLOW: For Love of Water
– from Democracy Now