Time to phase out all bottled water

Re Ontario government has taken sides against

the bottled water industry, Opinion, April 10 The Canadian Bottled Water Association is out of step with public opinion. Polls show two thirds of Ontarians support phasing out the industry.

We must conserve water, not let corporations like Nestlé profit from this resource as it becomes scarcer.

Just as it was time to close coal plants to protect our air, the Ontario government must deny Nestlé and other corporations permits to take water. Mike Balkwill, Toronto Elizabeth Griswold’s critique of the Toronto Star’s editorial regarding bottled water displays a surprising poverty of the imagination. Today, we need everyone — government, citizens, businesses — to put their heads together to resolve what is rapidly becoming an intractable ecological crisis: the massive taking of groundwater that is packaged in plastic bottles and sold.

The fact is that Canada’s groundwater is unmapped and barely protected. The fact is it is therefore imprudent to let corporations take groundwater at the rate they currently are (tens of millions of litres per day in Ontario). The fact is it is ecologically untenable to sell water in bottles that often don’t get recycled.

Finally, why sell to us what already belongs to us: clean and cheap water that we can easily get from our taps? Andrea Muehlebach, associate professor of anthropology, University of Toronto