Pie Palace

Last night, as a lounged around Bridgehead waiting for my Lovely to finish talking to her volunteer group, I happened upon a pamphlet from Inside the Bottle. According to the pamphlet, Inside the Bottle is a campaign to “challenge the bottled water industry.”

I shall regail you with some factoids from the pamphlet before I start bitching about the sites themselves:

1. Bottled water costs between 250 and 10,000 times more than tap water.
2. At least 25% of bottled water is taken from municiple water systems.
3. Municiple water systems test the quality of their water at least daily. Bottled water plants are inspected every 3 to 5 years.

According to the Polaris Institute,

1. Bottled water producers are not regulated. The Canadian Bottled Water Association has a voluntary code of conduct. But the largest bottled water producers aren’t even part of the CBWA, so it doesn’t really matter.
2. Bottled water producers pay virtually nothing for the water they use. If the producer uses groundwater directly, then they pay a few thousand dollars for permits that last 10 years. If the producer uses water from municiple systems, they pay a pittance. Every other extraction industry must pay a levy or royalty on their use of the common good. Not so for bottled water producers.
3. During the ozone treatment, bottled water is bubbled with calcium chloride, which can contain high volumes of bromide. Bromide can turn into yummy bromate during the process. Aside from adding a pleasant tingle to the water, bromate can cause cancer.
4. There is evidence that acetaldehyde (a probable carcinogen) can leach out of the plastic bottles and into the water they contain.
5. Health Canada is recommending that regulations around bottled water be improved.

And now I shall bitch:

I agree with these crazy hippies. Bottled water is a sham. I don’t have a problem with suckers being parted with their money (I work in IT, after all), but I have a sneaking suspician that the whole bottled water thing is undermining confidence in a public infrastructure; and the money is going to disreputable corporations who are doing nasty things around the world.

But their websites suck. It seems like a third of the pages on kNOwBottledWater.org, InsideTheBottle.org, and StopCorporateAbuse.org are placeholders. Their fact sheets are hard to find, and are fairly sparse. It seems like everything is an advertisement to buy their “Action Kit”. The only reasonable site that I’ve found is the venerable Polaris Institute, it contains information, but the pages are poorly organized. It was only after hunting that I was able to find some juicy facts.

If these people are going to make a difference in the world, they’re going to have to improve their outreach. Students like me have time to dig around on poorly designed sites to find damning information, but the general public doesn’t.