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Nestle Pure Life TV commercials and web initiatives are greenwashing Canadians into believing that bottled water is a healthy choice, and a manageable environmental solution. They make me sick, and very angry. Have you seen this? The thirty second spot shows kids playing outside in a sprinkler system and then drinking bottled water. The marketing advocates making a healthy choice, and implies through suggestive narration and on screen text that human bodies need large amounts of bottled water, daily.

Their website contains a challenge wherein the fourth component is to ‘Go Green’ and that’s like a cigarette company advocating users ‘Stay Healthy’. Readers please note: there is no green bottled water solution. Eco-costs include manufacturing, trucking, shelving, and marketing. At this point in history, the annual U.S. demand for plastic bottles requires enough oil to keep 100,000 cars on the road for a year, says Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute. The War Against Water Bottles reports that only 35% of Toronto’s water bottles are actually recycled, and that 650 million empty vessels are still being thrown into Ontario landfills every year despite most municipalities having the ability to recycle the bottles. A significant amount end up in nature, where they’ll take over a thousand years to break down.

The irony is that the City of Toronto just spent your tax dollars last summer doing experiential marketing in places like Dundas Square conducting blind taste tests in a widespread effort to prove the quality of our drinking water and the infrastructure behind its distribution. All over Canada our municipal governments are trying to educate city dwellers that tap water is actually the healthiest choice, but their marketing budget is small… Nestle Pure Life has a huge advertising budget; they can well afford to make suggestive tv commercials and reverse all our hard work…  But I wonder if they can sleep at night?

Bottled water is big business
Estimates variously place worldwide bottled water sales at between $50 and $100 billion each year, and the market is expanding at the startling annual rate of 7 percent.

Bottle water is almost pure profit; the biggest expense is marketing
Pepsi’s Aquafina or Coca-Cola’s Dasani bottled water are both sold in twenty ounce sizes and can be purchased from vending machines alongside soft drinks, and at the same price. Assuming you can find a $1 machine, that works out to five cents an ounce! Gasoline is cheaper. And both of these two brands are essentially filtered tap water, bottled close to their distribution point. Most municipal water costs less than one cent per gallon, and over 40% of all bottled water comes from tap water.

Nestle Pure Life is particularly evil. They’re actively greenwashing Canadians into believing bottled water is manageable. I found this image on their website in the Go Green category - look how many water bottles are in that blue box! Nestle wants you to think that’s acceptable. They deliberately show a mother and daughter together in this image, and the choice to use Asian actors is also part of a larger strategy. Studies show that second and even third generation Canadians are more likely to distrust public water delivery systems, and are therefore more likely to purchase bottled water. Nestle’s marketing focused on Latinos in the southern United States last summer for exactly the same reasons.

Stop the Corporatization of Water
Due to increasing urbanization, population, shifting climates, and industrial pollution, fresh water will soon become humanity’s most precious resource. In the documentary film Thirst, authors Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman demonstrated the rapid worldwide privatization of municipal water supplies, and the effect these purchases are having on local economies. Water is being called the “Blue Gold” of the 21st century and corporations are in a race to purchase groundwater and distribution rights.

It’s time to recognize the bottled water industry as a big component in the sinister drive to commodify a basic human right: access to safe and affordable water. Just say no to bottled water; just say no to Nestle.