California drought spurs protest over 'unconscionable' bottled water business | US news | The Guardian

California drought spurs protest over 'unconscionable' bottled water business | US news | The Guardian: "But water-bottling also carries symbolic weight because it takes a natural resource that theoretically belongs to all and turns it into a product retailing for many thousands – some studies suggest hundreds of thousands – of times what it costs at source.

Studies over the past decade and a half have challenged the claims of an industry that barely existed 25 years ago that bottled water is healthier than tap – in fact somewhere between one quarter and one half of bottled water comes from the tap – and decried the environmental impact of the plastic bottles it usually comes in.

“Pure drink or pure hype?” the National Resources Defense Council asked in 1999, and the question has never gone away. Until now, however, such objections have had little impact on the growth of the industry, whose sales topped 10bn gallons in the US for the first time in 2013 – 32 gallons per person – and are projected to be as high as 13bn gallons in 2014.

The US is now the world’s second-biggest consumer of bottled water, behind China. Nestlé and the other water giants, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, have often cut deals with relatively isolated, impoverished rural communities whereby they take a percentage of the local water supply, paying enough to keep municipal rates low for local residents. Government oversight often falls between the cracks of state agencies, the US Forest Service and autonomous Indian tribes, giving the companies greater leeway."



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