Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [81]
Within a few days all those containers are empty. The tap doesn’t scare me, not over the short haul, but I’m not convinced the children should drink it. In a quandary, and resentful about placing our health in the hands of a company with a clouded corporate history—Nestlé has marketed baby formula to African mothers, which has led them to give up breast-feeding; used underage and coerced labor on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast; and stymies citizens across the United States who are trying to decide their communities’ fate—I fire up my carbon-spewing car and drive to the store to buy water, the cheapest non-Nestlé brand on the shelf.
Protecting drinking water isn’t just a matter of money: it takes political will to allocate and spend it. But the more people who, like me on Long Island, opt out of drinking tap water, the less political support there may be for taking care of public water supplies—for protecting upstream watersheds, wrangling with polluters, tightening water-quality standards, and replacing old pipes. Distanced from public systems, committed bottled-water drinkers will have little incentive to support bond issues and other methods, including rate increases, of upgrading municipal water treatment. (Nestlé commissioned a poll of bottled-water drinkers and found 72 percent favored spending tax money to improve water infrastructure, but the poll didn’t ask respondents if they’d support raising taxes or water rates to do so.) It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the fewer who drink from public supplies, the worse the water will get, and the more bottled water we’ll need.
It’s happening already in India, where fewer and fewer city dwellers drink from the tap. Without financial support from ratepayers, public utilities are having a tough time delivering water to anyone. That isn’t a problem for the rich: they can afford to find water elsewhere. But poor people in the developing world, usually women and girls, end up waiting in line for hours to buy buckets of water that cost far more than the stuff they could have gotten from the tap, if the utility were doing its job. In Lagos, Nigeria, the poor pay four to ten times more for a liter of water than do people hooked up to water mains; in Lima, they pay seventeen times more; in Karachi, twenty-eight to eighty-three times more; in Jakarta, up to sixty times more; and in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, up to one hundred times more.
Is a two-tiered system—bottled for the rich, bilge for the poor—that far-fetched? Will the future look like something out of the Broadway musical Urinetown, where only those with money can afford to drink water (and eliminate)? Sadly, no. Water utilities are well aware that residents drink or cook with only 1 to 2 percent of the water that enters their home: most water goes for lawn watering, car washing, toilet flushing, showers, and laundry. Why spend millions to bring water up to high standards, goes one line of thinking, if so little is actually consumed?
“If we didn’t have to spend billions (and soon to be trillions) of dollars on pipes, treatment plants, and chemicals, could we better spend that money on other needs?” Breck Speed, chairman of the Mountain Valley Spring Company in Hot Springs, Arkansas, wrote in an editorial. “Does it make sense—indeed, is it even possible—for local governments to attempt to bring tap water up to the higher quality of bottled water?” Taking an exploratory step in this direction, the EPA in December of 2006 held a listening session on whether safe-drinking-water rules could be met, in limited situations, by using bottled water instead of tap.
Until recently, the town of Westford, Massachusetts (population 20,754, including my father), drank unfiltered and unchlorinated water pumped from wells near the sinuous and verdant Beaver Brook, a place I love to canoe. En route to the put-in, I’d sometimes pass the water department, a concrete-floored garage that sheltered