Tapped (1080p) FULL DOCUMENTARY - Environmental, Educational, Health

Summary

Highlights

• The bottled water industry is often valued more for profit than addressing global water scarcity. 🌍
• Many communities face legal battles against big corporations trying to monopolize local water resources. 🤖
• Environmental impact: Millions of plastic bottles contribute to pollution and harm marine life. 🐬
• Health concerns arise from the potential leaching of chemicals from plastic bottles. 🥤
• Calls for stronger regulatory frameworks and greater public investment in water infrastructure. 🔧

Key Takeaways

• By 2030, two-thirds of the world may lack access to clean drinking water. 💧
• Bottled water companies often extract public resources for a huge profit, yet face minimal regulatory oversight. 💸
• Plastic waste from bottled water is a major environmental concern, contributing to ocean pollution. 🐟
• There is a strong call to action for individuals and communities to fight for control and access to their local water resources. ✊
• Bottled water is not necessarily safer than tap water; often, it's just over-marketed tap water. 🚰

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:30: Introduction to Global Water Crisis The chapter "Introduction to Global Water Crisis" discusses the alarming prediction that by 2030, two-thirds of the global population will lack access to clean drinking water. It emphasizes that this is a universal issue, affecting individuals worldwide, irrespective of their location.
• 02:30 - 05:30: Corporate Control of Water Resources The chapter discusses the impact of treating water as a commodity, focusing on how this leads to corporate control over drinking water resources. It highlights the economic implications by comparing the cost of bottled water to gasoline, emphasizing the high price of water driven by supply and demand dynamics.
• 05:30 - 12:00: Nestlé's Water Extraction Practices The chapter discusses Nestlé's practices in extracting water. It raises concerns about the commodification of water and hints at the broader implications of treating water as a commercial product. The narrative sets the stage for a critical examination of corporate influence over natural resources, aligning with the theme of water being a critical and contested resource globally.
• 12:00 - 17:30: Legal and Environmental Challenges This chapter, titled 'Legal and Environmental Challenges', discusses various obstacles and considerations that arise when dealing with legal frameworks and environmental concerns. It delves into how these challenges can impact decision-making processes within organizations and affect broader societal progress. The chapter also likely touches upon the implications of regulatory compliance, environmental ethics, and sustainable development. Unfortunately, the specific details of the transcript are missing from the available data.
• 17:30 - 25:00: Consumer Behavior and Marketing of Bottled Water The chapter begins with an introduction to the concepts of consumer behavior and its impact on marketing strategies, specifically in the bottled water industry. It emphasizes how consumer preferences, psychological factors, and buying patterns influence marketing decisions and product positioning.
• 25:00 - 35:00: Manufacturing and Environmental Impact of Plastic Bottles The chapter begins with a background on the individual who moved to Maine during childhood, observing how the place has changed over time.
• 35:00 - 47:00: Health Concerns and Regulatory Oversight The chapter "Health Concerns and Regulatory Oversight" discusses societal and cultural shifts in relation to health issues and regulatory practices. It highlights the unexpected transformations in lifestyle and cultural norms, emphasizing the need to adapt to changing times. The chapter suggests an evolving dialogue around healthcare practices and regulatory frameworks, reflecting on the influence of these changes on everyday life.
• 47:00 - 62:00: Recycling and Environmental Consequences The chapter discusses the presence and influence of small businesses, particularly focusing on farmers. It highlights how farmers, as small business owners, have historically played a significant role in the community, although their numbers have declined over the years.
• 62:00 - 75:00: Call to Action and Solutions This chapter introduces the influence and operations of Nestle, the largest food processing company globally, particularly its impact in the United States through its many brands including Poland Springs. Nestle's significant profits from bottled water are highlighted.

Tapped (1080p) FULL DOCUMENTARY - Environmental, Educational, Health Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] by the year 2030 two-thirds of the world will be lacking access to clean drinking water [Music] this is a problem that every single person can be dealing with regardless of where they live in the world
• 00:30 - 01:00 [Music] when you begin to treat water as a commodity where the price of the water is dependent on supply and demand you end up with corporate control of all of our drinking water i mean think about it right now the cost of bottled water is more than a cost of gasoline when you consider that you see that
• 01:00 - 01:30 water is really the next empire [Music] i guess you have to have a problem if you want [Music]
• 01:30 - 02:00 making sense [Music] um
• 02:00 - 02:30 [Music] [Music] cause you made and make it the cause
• 02:30 - 03:00 [Music] foreign i moved to maine a long time ago when i was a small child but it was a lot quieter then
• 03:00 - 03:30 and so times change and we understand that times change but what we certainly didn't expect was a change in our culture and a change in in just our way of life you have a good day and i'll bring it
• 03:30 - 04:00 right back no problem no problem i'm gonna be driving [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're used to small business development we're used to farmers there are a lot of farmers around here there were a lot more many years ago and farmers are small business owners so that's what we're used to
• 04:00 - 04:30 we're not used to the largest food processing company in the world arriving on our doorstep [Music] nestle operates in the united states under multiple names and poland springs is one of the nestle brands nestle is one of the largest profiteers from bottled water they basically come
• 04:30 - 05:00 into rural towns and do water mining [Music] it kind of reminds me of texas and the oil rush in the 1930s [Music] citizens of fryeburg maine population 3083 are waging a war on the biggest
• 05:00 - 05:30 bottled water company in the world nestle a swiss corporation with more than three and a half billion dollars in bottled water sales in 2008. [Music] i wound up working as an assistant secretary in bill clinton's administration and whenever i went to the developing world i always found in my briefing books as one of the number one two or three national security
• 05:30 - 06:00 interests for the united states it was potable water drinkable water [Music] across the united states surface water the oceans ponds and rivers are held as part of a public trust but groundwater falls under a different set of rules
• 06:00 - 06:30 depending on the state maine operates with a rule called absolute dominion which was adopted in the late 1800s absolute dominion basically means that he who has the biggest pump gets to take the most amount of water which in fryeburg maine is nestle what's happened is that nestle gets a permit none of this is public knowledge unless someone is going down to the courthouse and and looking through local permits and so nestle gets a foot in the community uh before the
• 06:30 - 07:00 local people who are going to be impacted by this water mining even know about it they are pretty clever they started looking at what they needed to do within the state what they needed to do within communities and they had a long-term plan for this development they never notified anybody in town they never published anything about what they were going to do they just started pumping water we were mapped out without our knowledge
• 07:00 - 07:30 and consent and land was bought here and there in in the places they thought there was water and people in the town went how did they we didn't know that was happening nestle right now is pulling all this water out for free and selling it at a huge profit what a great idea i mean really well nestle uh decided that we'll just come in and take the water and some of us said well wait a minute here we're
• 07:30 - 08:00 not going to let you just take the water it's our water if they really were interested in us they could come into town and really pay taxes and what we were talking about was a tax at the wellhead so that as this water got packaged the people of maine would be paying less than one percent of this fee and the people in other parts of the country that purchase poland spring water would
• 08:00 - 08:30 be paying the rest since they were the beneficiaries of the water that cost nestle between 6 and 11 cents a gallon to extract and process and package that they sell for six bucks a gallon and nestle said there was no way they were gonna pay anything period because they say that if we have a fee like that that they can't survive that was it end of discussion
• 08:30 - 09:00 what's happening here in fryeburg is really a microcosm for what's happening all around the world nestle and other large water barons are out trying to tie up the rights to water [Music] why should a rural community's resources its ecosystem be drained so that people in the city can drink out of a plastic bottle when their water is just as good where they're living [Music]
• 09:00 - 09:30 who controls this resource who owns it and what nestle is doing in this community and they're doing it across the state is defining control it's all about control and we may be very sad that we have allowed the control of this water to go out of our hands because of the way it's set up at the present
• 09:30 - 10:00 the people of maine have spent a lot of money publicly and privately to make sure that this water was cleaned up and is clean and will stay clean for generations i hate to see our water taken the way it is just taken the water belongs to the people and the town gets nothing you think that's a good deal
• 10:00 - 10:30 activists claim that citizens in small towns like freiburg are finding it increasingly difficult to fend off nestle's overwhelming legal resources we think that a big corporation like nestle is able to come in with their big city lawyers and locally in communities where they're bottling water they're very powerful it's a situation where you're highly outnumbered you're outgunned
• 10:30 - 11:00 the town got their water from those springs for a hundred years but we were told that nestle did not want the town's water to come from those springs anymore they transferred the town's water to a deeper water well and in february of 2004 something happened all of the people who live in fryeburg village were without water for day and a half but nestle they never stopped pumping the water
• 11:00 - 11:30 they had plenty of water while the nursing home had to uh have the fire department bring in trucks of water i think it just kind of points out that the citizens come second in this whole thing it's a corrupted compromise process and that's really a big part of the problem once you can do this in one place you can do it in many other places
• 11:30 - 12:00 it sets a precedent once you set that precedent that that precedent can never be unset in the future we're not just going to be dealing with nestle and there are other water companies that will be coming because maine has vast amounts of water and so if we allow nestle to define who controls it then down the road we're going to have a much tougher fight on our hands [Music]
• 12:00 - 12:30 this multinational corporation from away is trying to come into our state and our bio region and take control over of our water from california to michigan to maine the nestle corporation is currently waging legal battles against communities to secure their local water mining rights we need to unite and tell them they can't take our water we want our water back
• 12:30 - 13:00 make sure nestle can hear you all the way back there in switzerland are you fired up water is a basic human right [Music] it's necessary for the survival of life on the planet [Music] when you start commodifying the necessities of life in such a way as to make it more difficult for people to gain access to those necessities you have the basis for serious political instability [Music]
• 13:00 - 13:30 as mark twain once said you know whiskey is for sipping and water is for fighting and there's going to be a lot of fighting about this before it's done [Music] every day america's largest bottled water corporations nestle coke and pepsi
• 13:30 - 14:00 pump millions of gallons of water from the earth bottle it ship it and sell it back for 1900 times the cost of tap water it's bad for the environment it's bad for public water systems and it's bad for taxpayers communities across the country are uniting in a fight to maintain ownership of their water supplies you will be at your opponent you will be able to call and you will be replaced if
• 14:00 - 14:30 from town hall meetings to courtroom trials activists are disputing the rights of corporations to sell their town's water [Music] the world bank places the value of the world water market at 800 billion
• 14:30 - 15:00 dollars that's a huge amount of money so you can imagine why these huge corporations are salivating over getting into the water market it's all about the control and ownership of water if we can't win this battle here in fryeburg if we can't win it here then the rest of the united states is going to have a very difficult time winning
• 15:00 - 15:30 the issue of climate change has added further impetus to these issues in terms of where does our water come from is it going to be there forever this is a a problem that every single person can be dealing with in the next 20 to 25 years regardless of where they live in the world
• 15:30 - 16:00 last year there was a drought in 35 states when you consider that water supplies continue to be dwindling in certain areas because of changes in the global climate it becomes imperative that we do everything that we can to protect fresh water supplies for use by the general public when private entities have a claim on public water supplies
• 16:00 - 16:30 you run into a real collision of moral values against the narrow profit concerns of corporations [Music] you know in north carolina it's hard for us to get used to thinking about dry parched cracked earth but indeed
• 16:30 - 17:00 that was what we were looking at things were getting very bad and by winter it was terribly grim one of the ultimate ironies was that pepsi was of course continuing with its bottling plant operations and this was at the height of the drought they were drawing over 400 000 gallons a
• 17:00 - 17:30 day bottling municipal water that then they were selling back at the very point we were running out of water i thought it would make common sense to put a temporary halt on that plant and they would not stop doing it citizens of raleigh weren't the only ones troubled by the amount of water
• 17:30 - 18:00 being bottled during a drought well the city of atlanta and north georgia has been experiencing a level four a very severe drought and we've asked people to cut back on their water usage people in metro atlanta have long thought there was an abundance of water because we're in a green lush environment and not realized that we're on borrowed time [Music]
• 18:00 - 18:30 [Music] we should be standing in about four feet of water or five feet of water right now where we're standing it's at its worst i mean really from for a sustained period of time [Music] atlanta had second worst drought in history the past year year and a half and it's affecting the water that we can use
• 18:30 - 19:00 we have severe water restrictions um that are that are placed on us for watering our lawns and car washes and things things like that what's most upsetting to me is to not uh not treat everyone equally and what i mean by that is is to have corporations such as coca-cola taking water out of the lake while it is under a severe drought and those in the local economy placed under restrictions
• 19:00 - 19:30 the marietta plant in 2007 it used like 118 million gallons of water [Music] bottled water companies use a very small amount of the groundwater in the united states the drinking water research foundation has done a study to indicate that the bottled water industry is responsible for only 0.02 percent of all the groundwater withdrawn in the united states it may be true that they're
• 19:30 - 20:00 taking that small percentage but they're taking it in a very few very specific places and many people have linked their over pumping of groundwater with lowered stream levels dried up wetlands depleted or decimated fish populations bottled water like other products obviously has an impact on the environment but again bottled water is no different than any other product that might be using water but beer doesn't come from my tap and you can't turn on your faucet and get coke you can turn on your faucet though and get water and it's free
• 20:00 - 20:30 when nestle was questioned in congressional hearings about the effects of their pumping on rivers and streams they testified that the lower water levels had nothing to do with the water they were taking this is affected by dams built by beavers is that the result of only your study or studies that are independent of your study i know of no independent studies but i'm happy to share our studies how many beavers would it take to do that i'm not sure how many how many years for 15 years we have worked hard to make
• 20:30 - 21:00 sure that this source is clean and abundant for everyone and it's pretty phenomenal in the last couple of years the trash that we're finding out on this river are plastic bottles [Music] hundreds and hundreds of plastic drinking water bottles they're making the profit and we're suffering [Music]
• 21:00 - 21:30 you know if they were using it making a profit and then putting some of that back towards the lake then that would be different [Music] they really see water as blue gold as just a source of profit they don't see it as a fundamental right as something essential for people and for nature it's only a way for them to make a profit so if it disappears you know 10 years down the road they've
• 21:30 - 22:00 made their profit water has really become a resource that we're fast losing and we're at a spot now where our bodies of water are increasingly fragile and threatened falls lake jordan lake and we need to be protecting them and we're not doing an adequate job right now we really don't have good comprehensive policies in most places to deal with
• 22:00 - 22:30 water supply and water quantity i mean one of my favorite examples was as atlanta was facing a water crisis the governor was going to bring people together to pray for reign to all georgians and all people who believe in the power of prayer we ask god to shower our state our region our nation with the blessings of water they were on the verge of opening a
• 22:30 - 23:00 massive artificial mountain of snow so people could ski in the middle of the summer there wasn't any rational thoughtful comprehensive policy in place that would say this is goofy [Music] with companies like coke pepsi and nestle so vital to local economies government officials are often forced to choose between environmental consequences or job loss well this government's not doing anything i mean it's government's uh for sale and so
• 23:00 - 23:30 everything's ready to be auctioned off including the public's right to water [Music] it is not something where you can just sit back and hope that your elected representatives will always do the right things for the citizens do we have a right to say what they do with our water when we're the ones that keep buying it and if we didn't keep buying it then they wouldn't be producing as much as they are so we have to look at it on the demand side
• 23:30 - 24:00 do we need this do we need to continue polluting our planet and wasting our money as a consumer chris fresh drink bottled water is the greatest advertising and marketing trick of all time [Music]
• 24:00 - 24:30 we started buying bottled water in a serious way starting at the end of the 70s when perrier came across the ocean and was introduced to urban markets it was a niche product it was really popular with urban professionals i think at lunch time it's a much better drink than some alcoholic drink and allows you to continue that sociability that alcohol provides without some of the adverse effects that prevent you from doing a day's work that you would otherwise like to do
• 24:30 - 25:00 [Music] it came in beautiful green glass bottles but we weren't walking around down the street swinging from the perrier bottles that didn't happen until 1989 when it became possible to put bottled water into lightweight cheap clear plastic bottles made of p-e-t and that changed the market the big change came when coke and pepsi got into the game they introduced waters because they saw their market share for sodas dropping
• 25:00 - 25:30 they spent hundreds of millions of dollars telling us to drink more water drink more water that it would make us thinner and more beautiful they associated their products with celebrities athletes and models [Music] and we drank it up and to the point where it became an 11.5 billion dollar business in 2007.
• 25:30 - 26:00 we've become like big toddlers we've got the nipple to our lips constantly we constantly need to know that there's something there just for us that we can just throw away [Music] we want everything individualized and personalized and just for us and we want to not have to wash it or take care of it we want to just throw it away and we want it immediately available and convenient otherwise will have a fit
• 26:00 - 26:30 so on one hand you had this tremendous marketing muscle and on the other hand you had a complete absence of criticism of bottled water until very recently and you didn't have utilities who provide municipal water they didn't have their own pr budgets they had barely enough money to keep their own systems going so they were in counteracting this onslaught of media print and tv ads [Music] many of the ads implied that the water was healthier for us than tap water
• 26:30 - 27:00 we don't consider tap water to be an enemy we don't can people typically perceive a difference in taste i can tell the difference in many bottled waters just as i can tell the difference between tap water and other beverages you can absolutely you know you're you're under oath but you're absolutely we'll give you i say that with your tongue and exemption bottle water industry does not see themselves in competition with that water
• 27:00 - 27:30 we provide completely different products we provide something that is actually portable that is convenient that is refreshing that is pure [Music] they use words pure which implied that tap water was impure somehow pure pure water pure pure water pure pure refreshing water well we're a very safe product safe safe safe safe that it's safe safe and safe i think bottled water is a safe healthy convenient product they're always saying their product is healthful um and implying the tap water wasn't it is much
• 27:30 - 28:00 pure it is much cleaner than many municipal sources they want to convince people that tap water isn't safe to drink again we we are not in competition with tap water susan wellington vp for gatorade also owned by pepsi says when we are done tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes i don't i don't it doesn't sound like she's she's loving the towel i would ask her well that's one person's opinion it's pepsi's opinion okay it's one person f pepsi's opinion in 2000 robert morrison ceo of quaker
• 28:00 - 28:30 oats which merged with pepsico said the biggest enemy is tap water what does that say well you read the quote i'm here to tell you that as far as the international bottled water association is concerned we do not consider tap water to be a our competition we do not see ourselves in competition with half water except for these one two three four five people at pepsi [Music]
• 28:30 - 29:00 many bottled water companies are careful not to disparage tap water because of their reliance on it [Music] in many cases bottled water is simply municipal tap water basically these companies are taking our water and selling it back to us for a profit and we think that we're getting something great in return that doesn't really seem like you're getting your money's worth if you're simply paying a very high premium to get what you could be getting out of your tap
• 29:00 - 29:30 [Music] in doing my research for the article i went across the street to a food court and over two days asked probably 15 to 20 people that i found drinking dasani water in the food court you know do you know where this water came from and none of them did when you buy aquafina or you buy dasani water it's basically your tap
• 29:30 - 30:00 water you're buying water that could come out of your tap and paying a thousand times the price for it i think what is the case is what you are getting is pure refreshing water that's what they would have us believe and that's what the labels would have us believe [Music] is it misleading to have a mountain on there when it's coming from the municipal tap again i would i would let you pontificate on that despite the mountain range on its label
• 30:00 - 30:30 pepsi's aquafina as well as cokes dasani are both bottled from tap water and not from a natural spring only after mounting public pressure did aquafina agree to print the words public water source on its label the mountain range remains and coke has yet to include this information on dasani labels well what we found is that the bottled water industry has been less than
• 30:30 - 31:00 forthcoming in providing information on what their bottles actually contain the packaging can have an adverse effect on the original product which is why it's so important for us to get the information from the bottlers who know exactly what's happening at their plants and who know exactly what is happening in that bottle i think most of the public does not know
• 31:00 - 31:30 that their plastic materials are being made and you know these refineries and petrochemical plants beverage containers contain a recycling code on the bottom of the bottle bottled water is packaged in p-e-t or p-e-t-e polyethylene terephthalate the primary ingredient in p-e-t is
• 31:30 - 32:00 paraxylene a clear liquid derived from refining crude oil [Music] eighty percent of pet manufactured in the u.s ends up in nestle coke or pepsi beverage containers
• 32:00 - 32:30 a number of oil companies in the u.s manufacture para xylene and one of the leading manufacturers is flint hills the largest privately owned oil refinery in the nation located in corpus christi texas this is the first step in the manufacture of pet
• 32:30 - 33:00 that my friends is flint hills and that's where plastic starts yes that's where plastic starts what they make is para xylene which is a vital compound in making plastics what a lot of people don't know is that it's in the benzene family and benzene causes cancer so as they're raking in the box the people here are sick and dying [Music]
• 33:00 - 33:30 when my sister passed away of breast cancer i had no idea how much my life would change at her funeral services people came up to us and saying you know so many people that are her age that lived in our community on the west side are dying of cancer or had cancer and after we buried her after the funeral we said remember all the people that came up to us who said what if dionna's death and others didn't have to happen
• 33:30 - 34:00 so we conducted our own investigation and we found that our community was built on top of oil waste feel that link to the oil industry is what soon after that got us to work with on environmental justice issues by the refineries because it was all linked to the oil refineries [Music]
• 34:00 - 34:30 we don't want people to suffer the way she died [Music]
• 34:30 - 35:00 when you think about the finished product of a plastic bottle you don't think about the process and the headache and the pain and suffering and the health effects that come from living next door it's out of sight out of mind but these are real problems that are being experienced by real people [Music]
• 35:00 - 35:30 something causes a lot of these neighbors around here to be sick it's not just me my other two neighbors they're they're they're sick anything that not pure air has got an effect on your health any anything and uh
• 35:30 - 36:00 the the air conditioners just bring it right right on in the house [Music] the doc come in and tell me say well your day's over son you mean never going to work again he's on oxygen and i have sarcoidosis which is a multi-systemic disease which means it can go into any organ if you ain't got a good strong heart
• 36:00 - 36:30 and a good strong set of lungs then you ain't got nothing not only do they need to think of that purchase of that one plastic bottle and what it can do to their health but by continuing to purchase these it's just going to keep them in business so if they stop buying that and not only protect their health but people that they've never met people that are suffering and dying like here in corpus christi [Music]
• 36:30 - 37:00 i worked for the state epa the state air pollution control agency and we were told that we could be fired and terminated if we went and and tried to inform the community even if they weren't complaining that there could be toxic substances in the air to handle our cards that they had a right to complain that they had a right to clean air okay and that we could if they complained then we could go in and do investigations we could write violations
• 37:00 - 37:30 we could take companies into enforcement and make them reduce their pollution until people picked the phone up and complained we were not supposed to agitate the communities i consider myself to be garbage because garbage is worth nothing so
• 37:30 - 38:00 neither am i if it wasn't for the love of my wife and my grandchildren i wouldn't be here because they love me they treat me with it what is everybody else who left me to do there's reasons why people that live around these refineries you know breathe
• 38:00 - 38:30 this air and drink this water have higher rates of cancer birth defects and other illnesses overall birth defects in corpus christi are 84 percent higher than the state average one of the concerns i have with the pet plastic bottles is that you wind up contaminating a lot of groundwater most of the petrochemical plants have
• 38:30 - 39:00 major chemical leaks in the ground so part of the toxic cycle of dealing with p-e-t is that there's so many uh problems that it it contributes to the groundwater is contaminated the air is contaminated the soil is contaminated but because people don't drop dead on the spot you don't have to think about it you know so you can get away with it i think
• 39:00 - 39:30 it's the perfect crime [Music] the plan hasn't always been two blocks from us it's just gradually moved up little by little so much so too we just probably didn't pay any attention until we started hearing people talk about emissions in the air and this in the air and then we became conscious of it and now we're very aware of it
• 39:30 - 40:00 [Music] people say well you're silly to live next to a refinery but when we came in here you know we were younger and we're excited that we found a house and i taught at the school it was right across the street from the school but now in retrospect i would like to move but we live so close to the refinery i
• 40:00 - 40:30 think it would be very difficult to sell our house [Music] you know there's battles that you you can fight and win and there's battles that you can start and you lose this is a battle that if i started i'd lose a man like me can't go against flynn hill [Music] when we as society don't protect the
• 40:30 - 41:00 most vulnerable then we leave our our full nation open to vulnerability [Music] [Music] when people buy bottled water that's made with p-e-t they are contributing to
• 41:00 - 41:30 these sacrifice zones and to the toxic exposures that people here are suffering with even though it may be people who are living on the fence line ultimately it affects everybody because because ultimately we all pay as long as bottled water is being presented as safe we will all be affected ultimately and eventually
• 41:30 - 42:00 [Music] we don't know what the long-term consequences are to this type of exposure so people think when they're drinking bottled water that they're getting a healthy product they're not conditioned to think well maybe there's something in the plastic [Music] and then we trust government and we trust industry when they say that everything's okay we say okay sounds good to us [Music]
• 42:00 - 42:30 our product is safe the package is safe i don't see any long-term effect presented by our package [Music] our members are meeting the standards of the fda the problem is is that to our last account we found that uh one person at the fda was responsible for overseeing all of the regulation of bottled water in the country are you that one person i do some spend
• 42:30 - 43:00 some of my time on bottled water but i have other responsibilities as well it doesn't sound right that there'd be one person in all of fda but who knows the fda is filled with good people who are trying to do their best but they are overwhelmed the drug industry is so big so powerful so rich the fda can't keep up and their hands are tied [Music] there's a huge difference between the regulation of tap water and the
• 43:00 - 43:30 regulation of bottled water um to put it simply tap water municipal drinking water is highly regulated and bottled water is virtually unregulated i don't think you would ever find a situation where a bottled water would not be subject to fda regulation if it's produced in maine and sold within maine it's not under fda jurisdiction we regulate products that are in interstate commerce that means products that move from state to state
• 43:30 - 44:00 most bottled water is produced in state and consumed in the state and the fda does not have control over those types of bottled water is it true that the bottled water maker is the one that does their own testing and then submits their reports to you bottle water manufacturers have to do their own testing on their own products and on their own sources but the bottled water company isn't required to submit a regular report to you correct no they
• 44:00 - 44:30 are not required to every city provides a public water quality report that you can access online anytime bottled water companies are not required to make their reports available to the public those tests can stay hidden in company filing cabinets they can stay and you know back up hard drives at bottled water companies they don't have to be published we've actually tried to use our freedom of information act to get some of that uh data and uh the the
• 44:30 - 45:00 fda is very reluctant to honor citizens organizations voyage at this time could you imagine what would mean to the industry if something went wrong with any of these products so they want to make sure that they're as pure as possible something's gone wrong many a time now there have been many recalls with water yeah okay i've i've never heard of any the u.s food and drug administration is recalled bottled water
• 45:00 - 45:30 [Music] when we find out that there's something in our tap water that shouldn't be there it's because it's constantly being tested tap water is regulated under the environmental protection agency and the epa actually has health standards to which each municipal water provider is
• 45:30 - 46:00 held municipalities have to test it many many times a day in a city over a million has to be tested 300 times a month in a city of 3 million and more it has to be tested 400 times a month so who are you going to go with half of one person at the food and drug administration telling you that these billions of bottles of water are safe or you're going to go with municipalities who are testing the water many many many times a day who do you trust
• 46:00 - 46:30 when you're talking about the bottled water industry you're talking about virtually no testing and people have just assumed that what we're getting is safe so we tested over a thousand bottles of water and found everything from arsenic to leaching from plastic bottles to bacterial contaminants and really what we learned from this was that you really don't know what you're getting
• 46:30 - 47:00 some people have gone to drinking bottled water literally because they are concerned about the water and the problem is they're unaware of the fact that buying bottled water would not is not necessarily safe that you end up being exposed to other chemical compounds [Music] testers over the years have come up with all kinds of contaminants in bottled water that we wouldn't have found out about if people hadn't taken upon themselves to to run the tests
• 47:00 - 47:30 in an independent test of bottled water we sent seven brands to two separate labs [Music] one to test america and the other to dr michael summer an environmental chemist then to ensure there'd be no bias dr king an epidemiologist and toxicologist with toxicology inc analyzed the results if you were to look at all the data i brought and you read everything you'd be horrified horrified at what they found from you know vinyl chloride butadiene to styrene
• 47:30 - 48:00 benzene i mean it's horrifying [Music] the first group of bottles were tested straight off the shelves test america found in their analysis of the samples toluene italian is a constituent in gasoline and it has been used in paint thinners it's a neurotoxic agent and it's also linked to adverse reproductive outcomes the second group was left in the trunk of a car for one week
• 48:00 - 48:30 dr michael summer tested some water samples from five different bottles and identified styrene in one of the samples styrene is a cancer-causing agent and can cause adverse reproductive effects summer also found three different types of phthalates phthalates can cause dysfunction particularly in the fetus and can cause adverse reproductive outcomes for males
• 48:30 - 49:00 and females [Music] it really concerns me when i see mothers blindly trusting bottled water and handing their children bottles of water putting their complete trust in a product without so much as questioning what am i giving my child yet we're putting so much faith in this industry that's completely self-regulated and that hasn't been held accountable by
• 49:00 - 49:30 anyone it's frightening while single-serve bottles of water are made of p-e-t five-gallon water jugs are made of polycarbonate plastic the primary ingredient being the controversial bisphenol a bisphenol a is the building block molecule that plastic that is hard and clear is made out of and from this polycarbonate plastic bisphenol a leeches gets into
• 49:30 - 50:00 the water bisphenol a may be one of the most potent toxic chemicals known to man bpa is found in many products including sports bottles baby bottles and water coolers [Music] the problem is bisphenol axe at very low doses as an estrogen the recent controversy over bpa started when members of the
• 50:00 - 50:30 scientific community questioned the methodology of earlier studies all regulatory agencies around the world are based on a concept from the 16th century that is the dose makes the poison more is worse that is not true for any hormone we tested a dose 25 000 times lower than what anybody had ever tested and we found that it profoundly damaged
• 50:30 - 51:00 every single part of the male developing mouse reproductive system after a decade of research on low-dose exposure to bpa dr frederick vomsel's findings captured the media's attention his work corroborated by other independent scientists led the senate to investigate the fda the media has
• 51:00 - 51:30 reported that the federal government's reluctance to regulate these chemicals is based on the reliance of biased studies from the chemical industry itself now i have to tell you if that's true doesn't that cast amazing doubt on the ability the regulatory system to actually protect the public senator at fda all of our products that we approve are based on data that are prepared and conducted
• 51:30 - 52:00 in studies by that particular manufacturer all you do is just rely on what what a study that comes from the industry itself it's a disgrace they didn't get it right with vioxx they're not getting it right with bisphenol a and there's going to be hell to pay over this senator we have looked at all the studies in the literature and there are hundreds the food and drug
• 52:00 - 52:30 administration did not look at all the evidence they looked at two studies produced by the chemical industry and made their decision on that basis have you asked for studies from independent sources we don't normally ask for independence then you don't protect the american people the national institutes of health reviewed 700 peer-reviewed published studies on bisphenol a 38 internationally recognized scientists
• 52:30 - 53:00 said we are extremely concerned about the impact of this on human health it happens over and over again that regulatory agencies are captured by the industries they regulate and certainly the food and drug administration especially the food branch is one that has really been in the food industry and the packaging industry's pocket for many years we've got to start to do what we're supposed to do not what the industry always asks us to do you have any response
• 53:00 - 53:30 none i think everything's okay there is virtually no major human health trend over the past 30 years that has an increase such as childhood diabetes that is not related to exposure to this chemical we find it relating to obesity breast cancer to prostate cancer diabetes
• 53:30 - 54:00 brain disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder liver disease ovarian disease disease of the uterus low sperm count in men we're talking about seven billion dollar a year industry they will spend any amount of that seven billion dollars necessary in advertising to the american public
• 54:00 - 54:30 trying to convince them this chemical is completely safe the scientists who work for product defense companies will never produce a study or certainly will never publish a study that finds a result that the sponsors don't like because their job their whole economic model is based on working for the companies to protect their products walmart has taken the initiative to remove this type of packaging from their
• 54:30 - 55:00 shelves they've been called more stringent than the fda how do you respond to that i i appreciate that you want information about bpa and i'm sure fda would be happy to respond but i'm not the appropriate person to answer those questions my concern is that the fda doesn't want us to ask about bpa because of the current investigation can you talk about it now no if i had known you were going to talk about that probably wouldn't have given you the interview bisphenol a is so frightening to the regulatory community because of the magnitude of the error they made
• 55:00 - 55:30 and bisphenol a is the poster child chemical that is going to dismantle the entire regulatory process and demand a re-analysis of all chemicals of the 80 million single serve bottles
• 55:30 - 56:00 of water americans consume daily 30 million of them end up in landfills the average world recycling rate on beverage containers is 50 percent the united states falls behind that world average with a rate of around only 20 percent of all beverage containers actually getting recycled this number has been on a steady decline year after year it's important i think to make it known that 100 of bottled water containers are recyclable and we do encourage they are
• 56:00 - 56:30 recyclable but they're not being recycled not all of them it's just because there isn't enough recycling capacity there's not enough collection the charge to provide safe drinking water in the whole country really comes down to municipal officials and they spent an awful lot of money to provide a safe product and they're competing then with the bottled water company and in some
• 56:30 - 57:00 cases feeling a little bit under attack by the bottled water folks and then at the back end after you know they go through this sort of insulting our water isn't as good as your water kind of thing then the municipalities are meant to pick up the tab by providing all the recycling for the plastic bottles well why not put some of the recycling costs onto the bottled water industry then what a good idea that's exactly what container deposit legislation or container deposit systems do
• 57:00 - 57:30 only 11 states offer container deposit legislation also known as bottle bills that's when consumers pay a small deposit on the bottles they purchase and get that deposit back when they return it for recycling that funding is what funds the entire recycling program it's completely in the hands of private industry so not only is it not reliant on taxpayer funding but they're not worrying about the volatility of government funding to pay
• 57:30 - 58:00 for the program in states that have a five cent deposit they get about a 70 return rate in michigan where they have a 10 cent deposit they get a 97 return rate it really is a proven system it's been in place in most of these states for 25 or more years and we know it works well a lot of states don't have bottled water covered in their systems because bottled water didn't exist 25 years ago when they
• 58:00 - 58:30 passed their bills of the 11 states that have bottle bills only six of them have expanded to include bottled water most of the states that have bottle bills they only cover soft drinks and beer and so when bottle bills when it comes up to expand them they send their lobbyists in they spend millions of dollars fighting those bills because we think it's an unnecessary tax on the american consumers what we'd like to see is actually more street curbside pickup curbside recycling is
• 58:30 - 59:00 the preferred method and can be very effective and we're trying to do everything we can to encourage consumers to recycle the companies say that they support curbside recycling they think this is the best way to get the bottles back into recycling systems they are really resistant to deposit programs they don't like the idea of this because it's bottlers that fund this they end up paying a penny or two per bottle after all their uh costs are figured in and and the money they make by recycling the plastic they're costly the retailers don't like them
• 59:00 - 59:30 we think that we can be more effective if we use curbside recycling what happens is people don't have access to curbside recycling how many people don't have access about half 50 of americans can't recycle it don't have curbside recycling that's right of course with bottled water this is one of those products that is consumed on the go so people don't bother to bring it all the way home again and put it in the recycling bin it's just not convenient enough for them
• 59:30 - 60:00 if one-third of their products are not being consumed at home then that means that's one-third that has no chance of making it to the recycling bid and that's 56 billion containers that's an awful lot to just give up the plastic bottle usually ends up in the lift of butt some gets incinerated a lot of it ends up in the pacific ocean [Music]
• 60:00 - 60:30 it's a bother to people they're not taking the time they don't have the space to keep it around until they can get it to a recycling center or to the landfill when it rains all that plastic is mobilized goes down the streams into the rivers and down to the sea that's why we're seeing so much of it in the environment [Music]
• 60:30 - 61:00 me [Music]
• 61:00 - 61:30 we've been driving for about three hours trying to get to camillo beach which is really the southernmost beach in the united states and it's where away is
• 61:30 - 62:00 when you throw something away it might be out of sight out of mind to you but this is where it ends up of the 80 million bottles of water we drink in the united states every day many of them make their way to the sea where they're carried by ocean currents and end up deposited on some distant shore this is the constituents of sand now
• 62:00 - 62:30 instead of being coral and shells and rock it's plastic this is a beach of the future this is what we are going to recreate in if we continue to pollute the environment with plastic future geologists when they take core samples and they come to the 20th and 21st century they're going to be finding a layer of plastic and in areas like camillo beach
• 62:30 - 63:00 it will be the deepest of anywhere on earth if you eliminate the scourge of bottled water you'll be eliminating one of the biggest problems facing our environment i was a chemistry major at uc san diego
• 63:00 - 63:30 and seeing the way our ocean was deteriorating and before my eyes living right next to the bay where i grew up i noticed that the water was not the quality that it was when i was a kid and i wanted to find out more about it so i started getting involved in the study of water quality and i got my captain's license and became a skipper of an oceanographic research vessel and since 1995 we've been conducting oceanographic research
• 63:30 - 64:00 all the way from australia to central california so we've been focused most recently in studying the north pacific gyre and the accumulation of plastic debris there net small net where's the where's the black mat i need the black cat in the central pacific we've discovered an area called the eastern garbage patch which is twice the size of
• 64:00 - 64:30 texas and has as its constituents uh a huge soup of plastic all our trash has been accumulated from asia and the west coast of north america and get that orange thing right there by you these phenomena that we're seeing here are repeated in the north and south atlantic south pacific and in the indian ocean and uh we're just now getting a handle on how much is out there
• 64:30 - 65:00 [Music] well what we do is we go out to this gyre and we trawl a net it just so happens that when we pull in that net more than finding the plankton in the ocean we're finding plastic and so what we see here in this jar is a one mile trawl out in the middle of the ocean as far from land as you can get anywhere on
• 65:00 - 65:30 earth and instead of it being clear ocean water with ocean animals it's a plastic soup with more plastic than plankton [Music] in 1999 we did a survey and found six times as much plastic as plankton in 2008 we went back and did the exact same survey and found 46 times as much plastic as plankton
• 65:30 - 66:00 [Music] our trash is filling up the ocean turning it into a plastic soup and those plastic particles are poison pills for the millions and millions of fish and invertebrates that are eating them so you're actually finding the remains of water bottles oh absolutely they're going into the most common fish we have
• 66:00 - 66:30 out in the ocean the lanternfish they're consuming these plastic fragments that are these smaller sizes we don't know how much plastic it's going to take to kill these fish but i can tell you uh so far the most we found has been 26 pieces in one fish what you have is a gradual decline of the health of both us and the marine species the green plastic watering can
• 66:30 - 67:00 [Music] bottled water may have a place in disaster relief but there are issues around bottled water that make it unsuitable for regular use and those issues need to be emphasized because bottled water is becoming a big contaminant of our environment
• 67:00 - 67:30 [Music] all these contaminants have resulted in a ocean which is compromised [Music] this is an immediate threat now this is threatening the entire marine food web [Music] i do believe that meaningful change occurs from the bottom up so if you get
• 67:30 - 68:00 enough people upset and angry and willing to do something about it i do think you can make a change there is no law in any books even homeland security i'm just very stubborn i'm very persistent and i think that those qualities have kept me going even in the face of all these intimidation tactics [Music] but it doesn't really scare me it just
• 68:00 - 68:30 makes me angry and it's like hell no i'm not stopping i'm just angrier and i'm gonna fight even harder [Music] so dow chemical asked us can we arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome where you delay publishing this paper until approved for publication by the chemical industry now we took that as an attempted bribe
• 68:30 - 69:00 when we told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with his offer he switched tact and started saying we want you to know how disturbed the chemical industry is by the work you're doing and uh made us mad and that was a mistake i had uh probably pissed off the people at the top of my agency they were very unhappy about what i had done
• 69:00 - 69:30 uh but you know i was trying to use the law to protect public health which is the way the agency is supposed to work not protect the company the polluter i could see that the agency was just too much manipulated by uh special interests through the oil industry and the petrochemical industry so in 1992 i quietly left not so quiet now [Music]
• 69:30 - 70:00 for some reason we've begun to take clean drinking water for granted and that's a mistake there needs to be a voice for the environment and the long-term interests of the community to protect and enhance this vital resource we should be strengthening our public water system and enforcing the laws to make sure that our water is clean [Music] it's important in a democracy that people stand up for things
• 70:00 - 70:30 democracy is a participatory sport [Music] by selling our water to this multinational corporation the district is putting all of us at risk there is no such thing as extra water we're here today uh preparing for a boat to ban bottled water but not just to ban the provisional sale of it but we're going to reinvest in municipal water infrastructure we need to invest in our
• 70:30 - 71:00 water infrastructure and stop the promotion of bottled water when we drink bottled water we're telling our leaders that we don't care about the tap water hope in the town of babylon is the kick your water bottle campaign will filter from the office to the community it is convenient to have a bottle of water to carry around but why not have your own body and supporters of these measures argue you're better off just filling a reusable container at the water fountain for free you don't have the same huge environmental downsides of billions of
• 71:00 - 71:30 bottles going into the environment the environment is everything so when we live work play worship go to school the state is talking about expanding the state bottle bill to include non-carbonated bottled beverages bigger better bottle bill just may soon become lost this is about taking steps to protect our state's environmental future
• 71:30 - 72:00 it's time for the legislature to pass the bigger better bottle bill it's essential to expand the bottle bill in order to help reduce litter and to generate some much needed revenue for new york state the waters shivers is it not one of the most important issues that we're facing today this is really the battle about the future baby boomers have got to stand up and
• 72:00 - 72:30 wage this fight and they've got to stand up and wage this fight for their children and their grandchildren more and more places are banning bottled water growing number of cities are banning the use of public money to buy bottled water machines in municipal buildings no longer offer bottled water the restaurant now serves only filtered tap water washington university in st louis will end almost all sales by the end of this semester we've had successes and i think we will continue to have some successes but it is david fighting goliath
• 72:30 - 73:00 we are the children of revolutionary war soldiers and we are not going to give this up without a fight we are not giving it up without a fight [Applause] [Music] a family of trees [Music]
• 73:00 - 73:30 a family of trees [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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