One of the great lies of marketing, maybe the biggest trick foisted on the public by the madmen, is the notion that bottled water is “purer,” “healthier,” that what flows from the tap. As shown in the award-winning documentary Tapped (out next month on DVD), most bottled water is actually tap water, wastefully packed in environmentally unfriendly plastic and sold at a huge profit.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. A trio of transnational corporations—Nestle, Coca Cola and Pepsi—have worked hard to dominate the water market. Along with filling bottles with free tap water and selling it back to its owners, the public, the corporate behemoths have moved to claim rights in many communities for spring water. Their long-range goal might be to dominate the world water market at a time when demand is growing and supply is evaporating from overuse and climate change.
Director Stephanie Soechtig traces the bottled water boom to the emergence in the ‘70s of a boutique market for Perrier in its distinctive green glass bottles. 1989 was the turnaround year when corporations began mass marketing water in individual-size plastic containers in response to slumping soda sales. Somehow, the marketing mavens convinced the public that tap water was dirty, when the opposite is almost always the case. The cost to the environment of all that discarded plastic seldom occurred to consumers who thought they were making a healthy, “natural” choice.
