The Sept. 25 letter to the editor from Kevin Keane, Senior Vice President of the American Beverage Association, tries to make the case for bottled water. The American Beverage Association is an industry group whose members include PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, manufacturers of the nation's No. 1 and No. 2 bottled water brands, respectively (Aquafina and Dasani). This obviously self-interested case is as full of holes as a sieve.
Bottled water is problematic at almost every point along its chain of production. If it's spring water, it is taken from some community; and more and more communities are discovering that they have thereby lost access to a precious resource, often without widespread public knowledge, comment or consent, and often with seriously inadequate compensation.
Whether it is spring or purified water, energy and petrochemical materials go into bottling and distribution. Putting such resources into bottled water production does not use as significant amounts of energy as some other processes, but we're not going to solve global warming by only going after the huge sources of greenhouse gases. As many on this campus know and act upon, the solution will come from a huge number of people taking many steps - small and large - to decrease their carbon footprint.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bottled water is a symptom and increasingly a cause of social inequality and inequity. As more and more of the people who can afford this ridiculously expensive way to quench their thirst buy their drinking water in bottles, this affluent segment of society has less and less reason to care about the quality of the drinking water that comes from the tap.
We appreciate Mr. Keane pointing out that it's a good idea for students to learn habits of recycling. As it happens, Tufts students are way ahead of the curve on this. They also know that, while recycling 10 bottles is a lot better than adding them to the dump, it's nowhere near as good as reusing one bottle 10 times.
We agree with Mr. Keane's point, that it's good that people can carry water in bottles with them. However the multi-billion dollar industry didn't invent this option; it has been around as long as bottles of some sort have existed and people have had decent water to fill them with.
Let's keep that option open through a good public supply of water. If we don't like what comes out of the tap, we should address this as a public concern - a concern for everyone - rather than spending a lot of money on the private solution of bottled water. The fact about privatization of public goods is that the more the rich spend, the less the poor get.
If you want to learn more about these issues (beyond what you can learn from the American Beverage Association), a good place to look is stopcorporateabuse.org, a Web site run by the organization Corporate Accountability International.
