Today’s Good News: Bottled Water Backlash
Bottled water makes me crazy. It’s one thing to drink it when you’re out on the road. But when people drink it at home or in the office, where they could so easily get tap water – there’s just no excuse. Alternet brings the good news that after a summer of organizing, restaurant owners and cities are canceling their bottled water contracts and advocating for tap. After famous chefs Alice Waters and Mario Batali banned it from their restaurants, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order this past June to cancel the city’s purchasing contract for bottled water, mandating instead that city departments rely on tap water. The next day, Newsom, Salt Lake City Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, pushed through a resolution at the U.S. Conference of Mayors to commission a study looking at the impact of discarded bottled water bottles on city waste streams.
Several CA cities, along with Boston and Louisville, are on board, along with several smaller cities considering similar bans. Several states are weighing laws to prevent bottlers from tapping underground water sources. Of course, the beverage industry is pushing back. It is true that some areas don’t monitor tap water as well as others and it could have an iffy smell or, rarely, toxic chemicals. However, filter systems generally can take care of any problems.
This summer, PepsiCo made the embarrassing public admission that its Aquafina brand water is actually nothing more than filtered water from municipal sources, a fact that the company will now note on its bottles. In fact, some 40 percent of bottled water, including Coke’s Dasani brand, is water that it gets from the tap for free, puts through filtration processes, and then sells back to the public.
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