Bottled water

Bottled water is almost entirely useless. Numerous studies show it to be no safer than tap water ¹. This is no surprise considering that one "spring water" was pumped from a parking lot next to a hazardous waste site ². The FDA itself says that the standards by which it regulates bottled water differ very little from the standards by which the EPA regulates tap water ³. And when the American television show 20/20 conducted a blind taste test of bottled and tap water, tap water won and the most expensive bottled water -- Evian (spells Naive backwards!) -- fared the worst ⁴.

Thus the production of bottled water is almost entirely wasteful. In 2001, 1.5 million tons of plastic were used to bottle 89 million liters of water ⁵. Add to this the cost of packaging, shipping, and promotion and you have tremendous waste of natural resources and human activity. To make matters worse, Americans throw out 60 million water bottles a day ⁶.

So why does bottled water sell? One part of the explanation can be found in the incontrovertible fact that tap water is laden with chemicals of every sort. Problem is, as already noted, bottled water isn't any better, and so either way you cut it, our health and our planet lose out to a system concerned only with making profits. Socialist society, on the other hand, will mean, as Bordiga put it, the "abolition of the enormous mass of anti-social consumption (from the cigarette to aircraft carriers)" and the redirection of humanity's tremendous productive powers towards useful ends.