Tapped (2009) is a documentary about the bottled water market. While this documentary is a few years old it is still informative and a good watch since bottled water is still a large market in the U.S.. In 2007 alone, the bottle water industry made $11.5 billion. That is a massive amount of money.
The issue with the water bottle industry is that often they are “stealing” water from local communities. While companies buy land to tap into groundwater so they legally have the right to take water, they also have industrial pumps that can take more water at a faster rate than local water needs. Nestle is a company that is very guilty of this. They have many different names they go under and they often are very secretive about their arrival in a new town. Once the public finds out it is often too late to take legal action against them. They have all the necessary paperwork not to be bogged down with lawsuits and they have plenty of money to fight them if they do come up. After Nestle has taken a massive amounts of the local water resources for bottled water, these communities then have to buy their water back from the company that took it. It all seems a bit shady to me. These big companies also like to keep taking water out of the source even during a drought, though the residents themselves have to restrict their usage.
Bottled water being such a big industry is not only bad for local environments, but it is also bad for the global environment, this is because of plastic. Bottled water has been around since the 70’s, but not in plastic until 1989. This changed the industry and allowed it to expand to what it is today. Plastic is lighter, cheaper, and very easy to throw away. Now most water systems contain trash of plastic bottles or remnants of plastics. This is harmful to animals that live in these systems, which causes a multitude of effects.
I personally find bottled water gross – I think it tastes weird. This movie made me understand many other reasons to dislike it. I only went into a few reasons why you should avoid bottled water in this review, so if you are interested to find other reasons, check this movie out.
