Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [63]
Months later, Fiji Water snatches back the spotlight by going “carbon negative,” installing a windmill to power its plant, switching to biodiesel and other alternative fuels for its trucks, and buying carbon offsets to cover emissions it cannot eliminate.
Perhaps the biggest victory for critics of the bottled-water industry is Pepsi’s decision, under pressure from Corporate Accountability International, to spell out PUBLIC WATER SUPPLY on its Aquafina labels (the ersatz mountain picture, however, will stay). “This is a huge first step on the way to stop branding water in a way that undermines confidence in tap water,” Mark Hays, a senior researcher with the group, says. The online community and the print media take merciless potshots at Pepsi for making huge profits off tap water, and Pepsi responds with ads that tout its seven-step purification process.
Every time I hear about Coke or Pepsi’s elaborate filtration procedure, I sink a little deeper into a funk. Why is there so much stuff to remove from tap water? Because we’ve neglected our pipes and conduits, I remind myself; we’ve washed drugs and industrial and agriculture contaminants into our rivers; we’ve condoned urban sprawl, which sends sediment, upon which bacteria thrive, into our reservoirs; and our efforts at disinfection sometimes make matters worse.
The alternative—bottled water—presents another set of issues. Producing and transporting it burns oil, which contributes to global warming, and the bottles themselves may harm our health by leaching chemicals. As we hurtle into the future, all of our drinking-water choices seem to be problematic. If only we’d taken better care of our resources yesterday, we wouldn’t be in this mess today. And while my first instinct is to blame the government for letting agriculture, industry, and developers off the hook, I have to admit it’s all of us: it’s the way we’ve come to live. We want convenience, cheap food, a drug for every mood, bigger houses, and faster gadgets. Whether it’s building a second home or manufacturing meat, magazines, or mopeds, it all takes a toll on our water.
The bottled-water backlash, combined with dire predictions of worldwide water shortages and their attendant human misery, bring water charities out of the woodwork. Give us your money, their full-page ads say, and we’ll dig wells and lay pipe for the thirsty poor. All kinds of celebrities, including Madonna (who did so much for sales of Evian in a more innocent time), lend their names and images to the cause of water for the people: The Tap Project, Blue Planet Run, Global Green, H2O Africa. (Deaf to the clamor, Jennifer Aniston goes the other way, signing a contract to endorse Smartwater. Some ads depict her naked and others place her, clad, in an elegant restaurant, where her plastic water bottle looks, to someone with my peculiar mindset, like litter amid the crystal stemware.)
Are the water projects worthwhile? “It’s that old distinction between doing good and making change—the latter is a matter of policy and organizing and rights,” Alan Snitow, coauthor with Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox, of Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water, writes to me. “The former is a matter of money and largesse that usually redounds to the benefit (or image) of the donor more than changing the long-term situation of recipients.”
Competing in a supercrowded field for limited consumer dollars, some water bottlers start to connect the dots. Eschewing appeals to wellness, they play to social conscience: choose our product, and we’ll send a portion of profits to a watery cause. Starbucks was an