Would you buy a $10,000 sandwich? No? Well what would you say if I told you that you pay up to 2000X more for bottled water than tap water? You’d probably tell me that’s because it’s cleaner and healthier, right?
But is it?
The U.S. buys more than a half a billion dollars of bottled water EACH WEEK! That’s enough to circle the globe 5X.
Yikes! How did that happen?
“The Story of Bottled Water” tells it this way….
It all comes down to one of the key economic drivers known as “Manufactured Demand”. If companies want to keep growing they have to keep selling. Back in the 1970’s when big soft drink companies started seeing their growth projections level off, they came up with their next niche product; Perrier water. Remember that? Most people shrugged it off as a “fashionable yuppie” phase. Water’s free, people said. Who wants to pay more for water? So, how do you get people to buy this fringe product? Simple, you manufacture demand. How do you do that? Use a marketing tactic to scare people about drinking tap water.
“When we’re done,” said one top executive, “Tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes”.
The next thing you do is seduce your customers with false advertising about how clean and pristine your bottled water is. Did you know that a third of bottled water actually comes from, you guessed it, TAP WATER!
Does anyone remember the days when the only bottled water was the Sparklettes man delivering big jugs of water to your house that your Mother would always have to get “a man to help her with the refills”?
Not any more, we’ve manufactured such a demand we are sending “recyclable” bottles to India. Imagine spending money to send our trash to India for “recycling”.
And yet the CEO of Nestle once made the claim that “Bottled water is one of the most environmentally responsible consumer products of the world.”
Huh? How could that possible be true when the entire process of manufacturing bottled water damages our environment?
Manufactures extract enough oil in the process to manufacture plastic water bottles each year to fuel a million cars. All that energy to manufacture bottles. Even more to ship it, and then we drink it in about 2 minutes.
And that brings us to the problem on the other end of the life cycle. What happens to all those bottles when we’re done? 80% end up in landfills where they will sit for thousands of years. The rest gets collected for recycling. In India. So, what happens in the “recycling” process in India? A process called “downcycled” where the bottles are broken down into smaller material for products that are used and then thrown away. The parts of it that couldn’t be “recycled” are dumped there. Shipped all the way to India just to be dumped in someone else’s back yard.
If bottle manufacturers want to use mountains on their labels, maybe they should show the mountains of waste.
Having successfully built a multi billion dollar market for bottled water, the next thing on the agenda is beating out the competition. Tap water. Our basic human right to clean, safe drinking water.
Robert S. Morrison, vice chairman of PepsiCo, said in 2000, ''The biggest enemy is tap water.''
https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/...
They want us to think it’s dirty and the best alternative is bottled water. In many places public water is polluted thanks to polluting industries like the PLASTIC BOTTLE industry. And these guys are happy to offer us expensive solutions.
It’s time to take back our tap waters. Make a commitment to NOT buy bottled water unless the water in your community is truly unhealthy. Then take the next step and join a campaign that’s working for real solutions like demanding investment in clean tap water infrastructure for ALL. In the U.S. the tap water is underfunded by $20 million partly because people believe good drinking water only comes from a bottle.
This is a huge opportunity for millions of people to WAKE UP and protect our wallets, our health, and the planet. The good news is this has already started. Bottled water sales have already begun to drop while business is booming for safe refillable water bottles.
Carrying bottled water is going to be about as cool as smoking . We know better now. The jig is up.
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