[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Toronto stood up to bottled water industry

[Bill Totten]

by Tony Clarke

TheStar.com (December 11 2008)


Toronto's decision last week to ban the sale and distribution of bottled
water on city premises was a watershed moment for water justice
advocates the world over. What was truly significant about Toronto's
action was not that it banned an environmentally destructive product,
but that it included a commitment to ensuring access to tap water in all
city facilities.

Toronto is now the largest city in the world to pass such far-reaching
regulations controlling the distribution of bottled water on municipal
property and promoting the use of publicly delivered tap water. Other
Canadian and American municipalities have enacted policies encouraging
the consumption of tap water and limiting the distribution of bottled
water using taxpayer money, but none as large as Toronto has taken such
a comprehensive approach.

Toronto's action is in many ways the result of a diverse North American
public campaign that has successfully raised awareness about bottled
water as an unnecessary and wasteful product when the majority of people
in Canada and the United States have access to clean drinking water from
the tap.

In Canada, this campaign gained significant exposure in early 2005 when
the Polaris Institute published Inside the Bottle: an Exposé of the
Bottled Water Industry, which provided an overview of the ten key
problems with bottled water. Over the nearly four years since, a popular
movement to challenge the bottled water industry has emerged at an
astonishing pace - as schools and universities, restaurants, hospitals,
faith-based organizations, unions and municipalities have decided to
turn on the tap and kick out the bottle.

As is often the case, Toronto's initiative had its own elected champions
steering it forward. City Councillor Glen De Baeremaeker and Mayor David
Miller had the progressive vision to include bottled water in their goal
of keeping unnecessary packaging out of city landfills. Their efforts
were coupled with a concerted grassroots push by Ontario-based
activists, public interest organizations, community and student groups,
labour unions and environmental networks.

In the days leading up to the Toronto vote, city councillors faced a
barrage of lobbying from the bottled water industry. These frantic
attempts to defeat the resolution continued over the two days of debates
when the industry brought a battery of lobbyists, corporate executives
and industry associations into the council chamber to influence the
vote. Representatives from the Canadian Bottled Water Association,
Refreshments Canada and Nestlé Waters, along with their hired lobbyists
from the Sussex Strategy Group and Argyle Communications, intensively
lobbied councillors during the entire six-hour debate. However, their
high-priced strategy ultimately failed to influence elected officials,
who voted with a two-thirds majority to ban bottled water and reinvest
in the public delivery of drinking water.

For many, Toronto has now become the champion of the "Back to the Tap"
municipal movement in Canada. To date, this movement has already seen
seventeen municipalities from five provinces ban the bottle. With 45
others indicating an interest to follow suit, Toronto's leadership will
no doubt inspire more municipalities to stand up and speak out in
support of public water. To further enable this municipal movement,
Toronto City Council also passed a motion to circulate its resolutions
and amended staff report to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities,
the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Regional Public
Works Commissioners of Ontario.

Increasingly across Canada, municipal leaders are showing that there is
a strong political will for reinvestments in public water services.
However, access to municipal drinking water is dwindling with new
buildings constructed without water fountains and older ones
decommissioning existing fountains. Now is the time to issue strong
calls to all levels of government for greater public access to free
potable water and a wholesale reinvestment in water infrastructure and
services

It's becoming clear that the recent love affair with bottled water has
reached its limits. Bottled water's fifteen minutes are up, the
marketing scam is out of the closet and the tap is back. The simple fact
is that there is no "green" solution to bottled water. While it might
serve a function during natural disasters or other contingencies, it is
no alternative to the tap.

Toronto has made the right choice to support public water infrastructure
and to increase city residents' access to clean, convenient and
environmentally sound drinking water - the only question now is which
municipality or province will be next.

_____

Tony Clarke is the executive director of the Polaris Institute in Ottawa
and author of the book, Inside the Bottle. www.insidethebottle.org

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/551909


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