Nemsie Gonzalez
Chief Copy Editor
I understand as much as the next person how evil it feels to drink water straight out of the tap — sometimes, I too believe I can taste the difference between tap and bottled water. In reality, over my two years here at the College, I’ve come to understand that I am actually quite delusional and it really is not different. It’s more likely that what I think is a difference in taste is actually a temperature difference, since bottled water is something I often drink cold.
Regardless of your position on the difference in taste, the quality of tap vs non-tap is by and large the same. It’s actually been found that bottled water is worse for you than regular tap water. It is almost completely unregulated and the amount of marketing abuse is even more horrific. As a “valley girl” who is often in Los Angeles, I know so many people who refuse to drink anything other than Fiji water for fear of tap water being unclean. So imagine my horror when I watched a documentary for my environmental sociology course just to find out that water brands who claim to be taking water straight from these mountain river oases were actually getting water from the tap!
Beyond the superficial things and the quality of cleanliness, there are real human rights issues that accompany bottled water. Water is obviously necessary for all life; we are made up mainly of water, and yet we often don’t think about it as a human right. The United Nations has declared the right to water and sanitation as human rights. But even still, “big water” is always working to undo that work. Water is historically something that has functioned as a communal resource, but now we have huge companies that bottle this “natural freshwater” or re-bottle tap and sell it back to us. Unfortunately, due to the evil of capitalism, we are forced to look at things in terms of market value as opposed to the value they may provide on an intrinsic level.
Something like water shouldn’t be looked at in such a way. In the same way the idea of bottling air is ridiculous, bottling water is stupid! Bottled water is also deeply unsustainable, and I hope at this point we all have begun to understand that most things can’t be recycled just due to the sheer amount of waste that is being produced.
But hey, even if you don’t care about the environment or the mass production of waste, maybe you care about social justice and equality. The water industry can be very divisive for local communities, separating them from the environment and even creating tension between citizens and the local environment. The water industry — enabled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — has taken over developing countries, pushed out indigenous communities and ruined their water supply.
Worse is the way that large Western corporations have lied to the native peoples and completely polluted their lands with the excess waste made in production. The IMF has used predatory loan repayment as a way to force these industries into developing nations that allegedly need infrastructure, making governments create divides between people and their environment. With climate change and the practices of the water industry combined, we are running out of water, the natural cycles are disrupted and soon, we’ll be hearing about water wars.
Returning to this idea of the market, capitalism and supply and demand, if we stop buying and drinking bottled water, less of a demand gives less power to the industry and stops fueling an evil system that hurts everyone. I understand this was not my most eloquent or well written Viewpoint, but it’s important to note that when we support big water, we all lose.