Commentary—

Think Outside The Bottle

By Patti Lynn

Thousands of people across the United States and Canada are pledging to choose public tap water over bottled water. And it’s no wonder they are doing so. Consumers are increasingly outraged when they learn more about the reality behind the image of bottled water. Though the product inside the glossy labels and packaging often comes from the same source as the tap, it is being is being sold back to us at hundreds of times the cost. The labels and marketing also promise bottled water to be something that is somehow more pure and reliable. This promise undermines public confidence in tap water, when public water is often more highly regulated than what is sold in the supermarket.

The Think Outside the Bottle Pledge is part of an effort by national and local organizations, religious communities, students, and concerned individuals to pull back the veil on the marketing of bottled water and to support public water systems.

With this pledge consumers are making a leap — they are beginning to ask not only, “Why should I be paying so much for this product?” but, “How is it that even water, which is essential for life, can become a commodity?” They are asking, “Like the air we breathe, and the public parks we all share, is water not a resource that should be held in public trust?”

 These questions and the groundswell of support for public water systems have a long history. Now, the Think Outside the Bottle Pledge is lending much-needed stimulus to efforts of public officials to address bottled water issues on the city level. In San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Salt Lake City, and cities across the United States, contracts with bottled water corporations are being cancelled or actions are being taken to reduce bottled water use at large.

What’s at stake in these cities and elsewhere is not just the placement of vending machines where once there were water fountains. What’s at stake is not just the long waste stream left from plastic bottle manufacture to landfill. What’s at stake is the shifting of control of water from public utilities to private corporations. What traditionally has been viewed as a shared and common resource is becoming the property of corporations whose decisions about who gets water and who doesn’t are based on corporate profits, rather than people’s right to the resource.

On the international level, the number of people around the world served by private water corporations grew from 51 million in 1990 to 300 million in 2002 — a six-fold increase. Though failed corporate endeavors in Latin America, Asia, and the United States put a temporary damper on the trend, analysts are making rosy forecasts about the next ten years. In North America, budget shortfalls are causing cities to turn increasingly to private corporations to manage public water resources — sometimes at great expense to ratepayers and to the overall quality of service.

So to stop further encroachment of large water corporations on our most valued public service and resource, thousands are taking the pledge now. They are pledging first to make a change in their own consumption of water. They are pledging second to support the efforts of public servants to tackle the issue on a city level. With leadership from local officials to cancel bottled water contracts and prevent corporate control of public water, this modest pledge can be a strong instrument for protecting one of our most valued resources.

(Patti Lynn is the campaigns director for Corporate Accountability International, a nonpartisan membership organization that protects people by waging campaigns challenging dangerous corporate actions around the world. For more information, see www.stopcorporateabuse.org and www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org.)