02 September 2008

Pepsico, clean up your act

I retrieved this from an otherwise pristine Bahamian coral reef last Saturday afternoon. Otherwise pristine, I said. The reefs of the Bahamian Out Islands are a treasure and the real wealth of that country sits just offshore --in a timeless realm that's very much uncharted, unseen and to the naked eye at least; untouched by disrespectful hands. Or so it seemed until I found this not-too-flattering advertisement for Pepsico's ugly spawn bobbing against a head of brain coral that had to be hundreds of years old.

A case could be made that some careless slob dropped this bottle of unneeded and and unwelcome consumerist flotsam overboard and failed to retrieve it. So, the fault lies with the user. And to an extent it does, but it goes deeper than that.

Bottled water is a joke, especially in The Bahamas. The well water in that country is some of the most sweet and pure available anywhere in the world. Companies like Pepsico, Coca Cola and Nestle have been working overtime for the last couple of years to convince the tourists who visit that country that there's something wrong with the water there. Worse still, those same companies spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince Bahamians that their water supplies are bad and that they can be more like people in the developed world by drinking overpriced, filtered American tap water out of an undegradeable and unsustainable plastic bottle.

The Bahamian people don't need to be told that there is something wrong with either their resources or their culture. That country and former colonies the world over have been crapped on by the west for four-hundred plus years and the assault of bottled water is a continuation of the same nonsense.

Bottled water is a bogus product sold to fulfill an entirely manufactured need. It degrades the public trust in public resources and clutters the landscape with detritus. Stop drinking it, stop buying it and Pepsico, take a look at the mess wrought by your hands. Unless of course, you're looking for a reeturn to this page in company history:

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