Capitalism Kills: Selling Bottled Water is an Epic Dystopian Scam
It’s disturbing how callous corporations can really be
There’s nothing more refreshing than a glass of cold water on a hot summer day.
Especially now, with fires raging across the whole planet, smoke on the horizon, and heat domes pinning us under sweltering, oppressive temperatures.
Being able to sip some ice water and splash it on your face or the back of your neck helps keep the worst of the discomfort at bay. Staying hydrated is essential for your health, and good clean water is a necessity for everything from drinking to washing up.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of water. Next to clean air, it’s the second most vital need that living beings have. We need water before we need food — in fact, we can’t even digest the food we eat if we’re too dehydrated.
We need water. Life on Earth couldn’t exist without it.
You’d think we could all agree that it’s important to ensure we all have access to it for that reason.
But when some people see the basic necessities of life, they don’t see a need to safeguard them for our use.
They see dollar signs.
I want you to imagine living in a terrible drought. The water levels in your town are so low that the taps in your home aren’t working — there’s no pressure to draw from. The municipal cisterns are close to empty.
You have no clean water to drink. You can’t bathe or shower, you can’t wash your clothes. You can’t do the dishes, mop your floors, you can’t water your garden, or wash your car. You can’t even flush your toilets.
Your children are being sent home from school because they aren’t clean enough.
You’re spending every day waiting for a city truck to come by, holding up a bucket to catch your prescribed volume of brackish water from the river. It’s all anyone has to work with. You have to make do. You’re feeling sick from drinking from the contaminated creek, which is down to just a trickle.
You’d catch rainwater if you could, but there hasn’t been any. There is a water pump in the middle of town, but the well is nearly dry and the lines waiting for water are at a crawl. By the time you get there, you’ll have been standing in the unforgiving sun for hours.
On the outskirts of town, there’s an industrial plant collecting water for sale. They suck it right out of the ground, filter it, and sell it in plastic bottles. Because of the drought, the price has gone up.
You can’t afford to buy the water they’re taking from under your own feet. You might die of thirst while the corporation fills the local stores with bottles, available for you and your neighbours for the same price as gasoline.
You need a lot more water than gas.
You’re considering hijacking a water truck; it’s far more valuable than cash these days, and you’re beyond the point of desperation.
Sound far-fetched and dystopian? I’m sorry to inform you, but this is the daily reality of many towns across North, Central and South America.
Mexico, especially Mexico City, is infamous for severe water shortages.
Imagine watching delivery trucks carry life-giving water away from your town, your city, even out of the country — intending to put the plastic jugs up for sale where the people can afford to pay.
What happens to you and your family when there’s nothing left for you?
Who do you complain to? The local government depends on the industry for funds, they aren’t going to take your side. International interests are also at play, and many of the reservoirs are running dry as a result of water harvesting across the U.S. border.
There are even criminal organizations that profit off of the problem, tapping into pipes and siphoning off water to sell as a racket. Sometimes the local politicians are so corrupt that they pressure the pipas de agua drivers to only deliver water to their own supporters and no one else.
Wealthy people are never touched by scarcity, so you can’t rely on them to make noise on your behalf.
The scarcity in South America, from Bolivia to Mexico, is gradually getting worse year after year. Climate change is only exacerbating the issue and it isn’t going to let up anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the bottled water continues to be trucked out for sale.
And that’s just the bottled water. A lot of the corporations pumping water for sale aren’t even packaging it as-is.
In the case of many beverage companies, they’re extracting the water in order to make things like soda and bottled iced coffee. Coca-Cola and Dasani are owned by the same group, just like Pepsi and Aquafina. They’re profiting through both streams.
This has a measurable, awful impact on public health — especially in regions where the water prices are so high.
Drinking sugary soda is less expensive than buying potable water. Rates of obesity and diabetes skyrocket as a result.
In other industries, the water is being used for things like cooling data centers, a process that often includes contamination from bromine and other chemicals used to prevent bacterial growth.
The water left over is not safe for consumption, so it remains inside the cooling system. And with data centers being built in places like Uruguay, it makes the long-standing droughts even worse by removing millions of gallons from the already-struggling water supply.
Wood pulp effluent, chemical runoff, toxic heavy metals from mining operations, you name it. Corporate production and agriculture suck up millions, even billions of gallons of water a day and what they return is full of poison.
But the water-theft scam gets even worse than all of this. Are you ready?
Most bottled water that you buy comes from the same source as your kitchen faucet.
There is no measurable difference. Corporations like Nestlé and Coca-Cola purchase municipal water cheaply, filter it, bottle it, and sell it at an insane markup.
All while making claims like ‘fresh spring water’ on the bottle.
It’s a scam. A plain old classic grift, snake oil at its finest. Premium quality, get it while it’s chilled.
They take water away from the low-income people who don’t have the power to stop them, and they make a killing — pardon the morbid pun — by selling it back to them at a price they can’t refuse.
Or they sell them cheap soda that’ll leave them sick for life, all while pumping toxins back into the ecosystems they depend on.
And here they’re just selling us the exact same water that comes out of our kitchen faucets, expecting us to pretend it tastes like a fresh mountain spring.
It’s bold, audacious, and morally bankrupt. In other words, it’s exactly what you’d expect of unregulated capitalistic greed.
The United Nations lists water as one of the universal human rights that all people should have access to. Fighting to improve the availability of clean water for drinking and sanitation is at the core of our responsibility to one another, no matter where we come from.
No matter our country of origin, no matter our economic situation, we are all human beings.
We all have the same basic needs, and we all deserve the same shot at a decent life — not based on how much money we have, but on the simple fact that we exist.
Solidarity wins.
I was literally just thinking about this, this morning. I'm traveling/camping and had a rare moment of choosing bottled water over the option of the moment, well water coming out of a rubber hose....and thinking, what will it be next, with the current so-called EPA...bottled air?? Decades ago i used to purchase bottled water all the time, thinking that tap water was universally evil. I really had it backwards- now when home I just filter my tap water & am just getting another travel filter ( ironically made of plastic).
Yeah, I think Nestle owns almost all the water on the planet, last I looked. That's why I use a Brita water filter pitcher for all my water. It's adorned with a Southern Poverty Law Center bumper sticker that says, "Fight Hate" on one side.