Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [83]
Cynically I think, “Why not?” If I were in the containerized-water business, I’d do everything in my power to either hide the bubblers or make public supplies look wildly unattractive. A new football stadium in Orlando, Florida, was built without a single water fountain; one hot afternoon, a dozen people were treated for heat exhaustion after the concession stands, which charged three bucks for a bottle of water, ran out. After the scandal hit the papers, fifty water fountains were quickly installed. At Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania, the dining-services company removed the free waterspouts from its Pepsi soda machines, steering students to bottled water. Only after much student protest did the spouts re-sprout.
It’s easy for me to grok the domestic linkages between privatization and the loss of protection for our public supplies. But refusing Dasani in Des Plaines, I’m pretty sure, isn’t going to help a thirsty Indian any more than cleaning your plate will help a starving African. Again, I ask Kellett to explain this connection. The first step, she says, are Corporate Accountability’s taste tests: they’re supposed to reveal that bottled water tastes no better than tap (don’t try this in places with distinctive-tasting water). The second step is understanding that reliance on bottled water undermines confidence and investment in public water systems. And from there, it’s on to India.
“Only by educating and mobilizing the public in the U.S.,” Kellett says, can groups like hers “support international efforts to challenge corporate control and protect the fundamental human right to water.” The logic of this argument remains vague to me, but the public criticism of the ecological impact of bottled water—its carbon footprint in particular—continues to gain traction: more and more local governments are canceling water contracts, and manufacturers of filters and reusable bottles are seeing record sales. Coke, Nestlé, and Fiji, among other bottlers, announced significant conservation efforts in 2007, though none scaled back on bottling. In fact, many operations expanded.
I admire the steps some companies have taken to shrink their carbon and water footprints, but I realize they will never satisfy antiprivatization groups until they quit profiting from water. Were clean water unlimited, of course, the issue of who owns it, and the morality of turning something so fundamental to life into a product controlled by private companies, wouldn’t be nearly so crucial. But clean water is limited, and it’s only getting more so.
Even before my first visit to Fryeburg, before my very first visit with Tom Brennan in the woods that buffered Poland Spring’s source in Hollis, I had a vague idea that bottled water wasn’t for me. It costs too much. Plus, I have no problem with tap. It tastes good to me, and in most places of the country it meets—or exceeds—federal and state standards.
But then I learned more about public water supplies—my own and that of other cities. Springwater, at that point, started to look pretty good. Unfortunately, I soon discovered, the companies that bottle springwater may sometimes threaten not only private wells and native ecosystems, but also native democracies. I considered, briefly, smaller-scale bottlers of fine waters from noble lineages. Michael Mascha, that day in Bryant Park, had been persuasive. But I couldn’t stomach either their price or the road miles behind them. Surely there was something more sustainable, more local, out there.
How about purified tap? Aquafina and Dasani don’t threaten swimming holes, springs, macro-invertebrates, native flora, or local control (at least in this country).