Wisconsin environmental groups have banded together to urge closing a loophole in the pending Great Lakes Compact that allows unregulated sales of Great Lakes water in bottles smaller than 5.7 gallons.
That's a pretty big bottle, and along with the billions of those ubiquitous, costly smaller containers inexorably moving Great Lakes water away from source supplies, the bottled water binge is bad news for everyone except the big corporate bottlers.
Here's a Canadian perspective on why bottled water sales are harming the Great Lakes.
It's another addition to demands across the entire Great Lakes basin for tougher diversion standards in the Compact, and in implementing legislation pending or being drafted.
That effort is stalled in Wisconsin.
Here comes privitization of water to the Great Lakes region. Problems with the high cost of water are already affecting people in the Great Lakes region. For instance, in Detroit, MI, water utility costs have sky-rocketed so much that people can't pay their bills and their water is shut off. http://www.detroitnews.com/apps/
ReplyDeletepbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070209/
METRO/702090424 This has resulted in a child being burned to death in a house because, "When Detroit firefighters arrived they were unable to hose down the house because two fire hydrants located on the block did not have water. According to residents the fire truck that carries water did not work either. After years of budget-cutting the city's public services and infrastructure have been left in a general state of disrepair."
This is outrageous. Furthermore, people's children are being taken out of the house now because there is no water.