Thursday, August 02, 2007

Bottled Water is Tap Water

The bottled water that's sold is nothing but tap water, admits Coca Cola. Ditto Pepsi's Aquafina.

"Aquafina is the single biggest bottled water brand, and its bottles are currently labeled 'P.W.S.' The new labels will spell out 'public water source.'" -- from the Seattle Times

More information about the privatization of water, and why it's not only stupid to pay $1.39 of your hard earned money for a bottle of your own local tap water, but it's bad for the environment, here.

End of today's lecture.

UPDATE: video & transcript about the topic from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

2 comments:

Mark Anderson said...

I have never, never, NEVER understood the bottled water craze/fashion statement. Ugh...

Corey said...

I've been hearing a lot of noise lately about bottled water. It seems that people are shocked - SHOCKED - to find out that bottled water is, in many cases, simply municipal tap water that is filtered and bottled.

Excuse me guys, but no shit.

Think about two of the most popular brands of bottled water: Aquafina and Dasani. Aquafina is bottled by PepsiCo, Dasani is bottled by Coke-a-Cola. What makes these brands popular is not a) the virginal spring from which the water originated, b) the fresh, clean taste of pure glacial runoff, or c) any other characteristic of the water itself.

What makes these brands popular is that both of these companies already had established bottling facilities and distribution channels. They already had their products in every store in the country (world?), all they had to do to sell their water was to clear off a little space on their shelves.

Here's the shocker, people: Coke and Pepsi (the beverages) are made from exactly the same tap water. This is, apparently, not newsworthy because Coke and Pepsi are marketed as Colas and not as water. Whatever.