Will water slake a thirst for profits?
Investors weigh the ethical question of making money off an essential resource.
from the June 25, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
Some take aim at bottled water
Activists, such as those at Ottawa's Polaris Institute and Boston's Corporate Accountability International, argue it's wrong for large corporations to take control of the general public's water supplies. Polaris this month kicked off what it calls an exposé of the $11 billion bottled-water industry, which the group takes to task for packaging what it calls a "free" resource and depleting underground aquifers, even in such semi-arid places as drought-ravaged Australia. Its chief targets are beverage giants Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Danone.
For its part, the International Bottled Water Association contends that bottling accounts for only 0.02 percent of groundwater withdrawals in the United States. "Groundwater supplies are continuously 'recharged' or replenished by precipitation, thus they are considered 'renewable,' " the association said in a November 2006 position statement. Critics' "narrow focus on the bottled-water industry does nothing to protect and sustain groundwater [because] bottled water is one of thousands of products to use water as an ingredient or in production."
Activists also worry about contracts awarded to private firms to operate municipal water systems. They've taken aim at two French water giants, Suez and Veolia Environnement, for allegedly taking over local systems and then raising prices, failing to reinvest, or both.
"When you invest in a for-profit enterprise to deliver water to the public, at least in North America, what's happening is that we're having a transfer from public water systems to private water systems," says Verda Cook, water campaign coordinator for Polaris. "You're siphoning off the profits. Those profits ... are not being returned to a community but are going to investors. So you're playing into what we feel is the destruction of a society or a municipality."
Veolia begs to differ: "We're actually able to reduce the overall cost to citizens while simultaneously creating a profit for the company," says Scott Edwards, spokesman for Veolia North America, a division of Veolia Environnement. He says, for instance, that Tampa, Fla., taxpayers saved $80 million by contracting this spring with Veolia to build a water treatment plant.
Suez declined to comment.
RSS feed
