I just spent $2.15 on a bottle of water. I am just beside myself.
It happened in an instant. I was thirsty, the deli was right there and I walked in. Having given up soft drinks forever, I grabbed the tiniest, flimsiest bottle of water they sold.
I thought the woman behind the counter had hit a wrong button on the register. Once more she said $2.15. Yes, I dug in my pocket for another buck and a quarter. I was thirsty.
The now-empty bottle sits on my desk as I type this. I think it is mocking me.
Even the folks at Corporate Accountability International laughed at me when I called.
Based in Boston, it has been around for more than 30 years, putting abuses by corporations in the public spotlight. Its latest campaign is against the bottled-water industry, which it pretty much has labeled a racket.
It is how I found out the state of Colorado spent more than $154,000 on bottled water last year alone. And I thought I was a sucker.
John Stewart was their spokesman’s name. He hates bottled water only slightly more than I do now.
“You probably thought what was in that bottle was better than what you can get out of the tap, huh?” he asked.
Well, of course I did.
Everybody thinks that, he said. It is a perception bought and paid for by millions of marketing dollars every year. Water-bottling companies, he said, reinforce it by plastering waterfalls, setting suns and assorted other bucolic images on their labels.
He asked me to look at the label on the bottle and tell him the source of the water.
“Originates from public water sources,” the label read. John Stewart chuckled.
If you read Corporate Accountability’s website, it is doubtful you would ever plop $2.25 or even a nickel on a counter again for a bottle of water:
Producing enough bottles to feed our water thirst required the equivalent last year of 17 billion barrels of oil, enough to fuel more than 1 million cars in the U.S. for one year.
More than 4 billion pounds of the bottles end up in the nation’s landfills and roadsides each year, which costs American cities $70 million a year in disposal costs.
And 40 percent of the water sold in bottles comes right out of municipal water taps, Stewart said, the same water that runs into your kitchen sinks.
“We just believe water is a human right and not a commodity to be bought and sold for profit,” he said.
As part of its “Think Outside The Bottle” campaign, Corporate Accountability is working with governments nationwide to stop spending millions of dollars on bottled water for employees and to use those funds on upgrades to their water systems.
Gov. Bill Ritter, Stewart said, “has been extremely receptive to our message.” He has instituted an “environmentally preferable purchasing policy” that requires agencies to buy the most environmentally friendly products and use reusable containers where water is readily available.
I asked Stewart a question to which I already knew the answer.
“I honestly don’t know if you overpaid,” he said. “But then I don’t drink bottled water. But there are some things you can do to get even.”
That I already know.
I moments ago took that mockingly expensive bottle from my desk to the water fountain down the hall and refilled it.
Good heavens, the new stuff tastes better.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
