Blog Posts: Bottled water

World Water Day is an excellent opportunity to consider the ways in which our choices as consumers affect world water resources. As many of you already know, bottled water contributes to the world’s pollution and waste problems. It is also a prime example of corporate spin run amok. While the oh-so-clever industry execs have convinced many people that bottled water is better than water from the tap, in most cases this is simply not true. It actually reminds us of another industry infamous for using misinformation to peddle its products… Read the full article…

Hey there! This is Kelly Barrett, communications intern here at Food & Water Watch, with an important announcement. If you haven’t yet heard of World Water Day, listen up…

March 22nd is World Water Day!

Like the rest of us at Food & Water Watch, I’m pumped about World Water Day and want you to be too. What better time to take back our tap? We are so excited, we want to hear all about what you are doing to celebrate World Water Day. There are lots of ways to get involved, so get moving and then tell us about it via Twitter, on Facebook, or in a comment on this post. Here are some ideas for getting in on the action:

1. Pledge to Take Back the Tap!
2. Ask Congress to Take Back the Tap.
3. Join our virtual march to Take Back the Tap on Facebook (with lots of ways to take action).
4. Help to host a movie screening of one of these great documentary films that focus on the world’s water crisis.
5. Sign up to receive our action alerts and if you’re one of the first 25 to do so, win that nifty “Take Back the Tap” stainless steel water canteen.
6. Then…after you take action, tweet us about it, write on our Facebook wall or on the event page, or leave a comment here to tell us what you’re doing.

Read the full article…

Nestle’s apparent quest to profit from sucking the earth dry of water may have hit a snag: people don’t seem to be buying as much bottled water anymore. Last week, the beverage mega conglomerate announced that revenue from its bottled water operations dropped 1.4 percent in 2009. In the grand tradition of corporate spin, Nestle’s public relations department had a convenient scapegoat for this turn of affairs: the recession. Read the full article…

The bottled water industry tries very hard to convince consumers that buying their product is fine, because all those empty bottles are recyclable. What they don’t address is exactly what plastic bottle recycling often entails.

Check out this video from National Geographic for a closer look at the process plastic bottles go through in order to produce polyester clothing in China.

As the video shows us, plastic bottles are collected in various locations, like here in the US, or over in Europe. Then, the plastic bottles are shredded up, packaged in cellophane, boxed up into giant presents of plastic goodness (a valuable commodity, of course) and sent on a 7,000-mile trip to China. The plastic then goes through an unimaginably complex process involving boiling, rotating, drying, melting, spinning, bonding, tearing, packaging, scraping, threading, weaving, looping, and brushing until the polyester textile is made. But never fear, the stylists are very economical while cutting out the templates prior to the polyester being sewn–they wont create anymore waste than necessary. Phew! Read the full article…

As part of a larger effort to go as green as possible, the 15^th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen has been bottled water free! Forty water stations have been installed throughout the conference to provide water to the 19,000+ participating delegates. Were delighted that the world‚ largest gathering of environmental delegates, campaigners, diplomats, and activists has finally joined the movement towards conscious water use. After all, it takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. While we applaud the United Nations for recognizing the harsh impact of bottled water on our environment, we are left to wonder why was water issues are not on the COP15 agenda? Read the full article…

Not long ago, a flurry of emails and a quick trip to the Bronx exposed Nestle‚ newest marketing technique for its bottled water endeavors–a retail store with Latino flair. Located at 908 Southern Blvd, Nestle‚ Mercado del Agua (Water Market) immediately struck me as a serious breach in environmental justice. Read the full article…

If you’re wondering how to use art to discuss water issues, look no further than the Minneapolis arts community. While in town last week for the opening of the film “No Impact Man,” I spent a day meeting with local artists there to learn about their work to use the visual and aural arts as a means of illustrating the social and political issues surrounding water. Turns out there‚ a lot to see.I kicked things off over breakfast with Liz Dodson and Marilyn Cuneo, organizers of “Women and Water Rights,” which opens at the University of Minnesota‚ Nash Gallery next spring. The month-long exhibit will feature American and international female artists whose work focuses water rights. Afterward, I took a spin out to the charming Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to catch the tail end of “Waterosity,” a collection of 10 juried art installations exploring the “gifts of water.” There, landscape designers Debra Ensteness and Sheila Hawthonrne met me to discuss their instillation, “Take Back the Tap: Protect Our Environment“. The giant walk-through water bottle was constructed with 7,500 discarded bottles and incorporates facts about the detrimental effects of bottled water in order to illustrate its blight on the environment and your wallet. Read the full article…

Last week, citizens in Florida got a strong commitment from Columbia county officials that no new water bottler on the Santa Fe River would be allowed.  The county‚ statement is expected to carry serious weight in whether the Suwannee River Water Management District, which has final say on water permits, gives the bottling facility a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Part of the success is due to the work of Our Santa Fe River (OSFR), an organization of North Florida citizens working to protect the river. The group, a strong ally of Food & Water Watch, continues to successfully lead the fight against several dangerous bottling proposals that could harm the river‚ ecosystem and contribute to declining water levels in the region. Read the full article…

Fresh on the heels of its defeat by activists in McCloud, Nestlé ramped up its efforts to appear a responsible corporate citizen this week by unveiling plans to use a new, ‚lightweight” plastic for its bottled water. According to the industry publication Food Production Daily, the new bottle will weigh 9.5 g, down from 12.5g. In the same article, Nestlé Waters North America CEO Kim Jeffries touted the ‚environmental impacts” of the new bottle: ‚Lightweighting our bottle is the single biggest impact we can have from an environmental standpoint on our carbon footprint,” said Jeffries.

While we are obviously all for being gentler on the environment, we have an even better idea for Nestlé: stop bottling water for profit altogether. Read the full article…

Last week, the Miss America Organization announced it would embark on a mission to “preserve the planet.“ Its method of doing so? Switching to Nature Bottles, a so-called “environmentally friendly” brand of bottled water. Although we appreciate the good intention, the fact is, there is no such thing as “environmentally friendly” bottled water.

While wasteful, polluting plastic bottles are one reason that bottled water is bad for the environment, they are not the only one. In fact, the recent trend towards packaging water in “environmentally friendly” or “green” bottles is really just a trick on the part of the bottled water industry to distract you from the fact that its product is a destructive waste of money. Read the full article…