Corporate Accountability International
Sept. 29, Gov. Martin O’Malley announced plans to phase out taxpayer spending on bottled water for all state agencies and support public tap water. With this announcement, Maryland becomes the sixth state to respond to the urging of the grassroots to think outside the bottle.
Maryland’s drinking water quality is among the highest in the world, yet Maryland residents drink more than 261 million gallons of bottled water a year. At the same time, Maryland’s drinking water infrastructure needs an investment of $3.96 billion over the next 20 years.
“Today’s decision by the Green Purchasing Committee will have a positive impact on our state’s budget and our environment,” said Gov. O’Malley. “I want to thank the committee for its work implementing the Green Purchasing Act and ensuring that we are proactively taking responsive steps to improve our environment and cut costs at the same time.”
The state of Maryland has been a hotbed for bottled water free activity at the city and county level—both Fredrick and Montgomery County as well as the City of Takoma Park are bottled water free. In March, dozens of establishments around the state capital announced that they were going bottled water free and urged the state government to make this same simple, yet important policy change.
“This is a no-brainer for our city,” said Mayor Bruce Williams of Takoma Park. “Our public officials are championing investment in public water systems since these systems provide needed drinking water, create green jobs and preserve the long-term viability of our most essential shared resource. It’s a win-win equation when states stop pouring taxpayer dollars down the drain and plastic into landfills.”
Over 30 local businesses in Annapolis, including Level: A Small Plates Lounge and Free State Press signed on to support Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign, which aims to promote, protect and ensure public funding for the nation’s public water systems. Seventeen of these 30 businesses and institutions have gone bottled water free.
“It is a shame that consumers are being led to bottled water while the political will to adequately fund public water systems has waned. Today, bottling giants like Nestlé stake their long-term growth on the continued decline of public water infrastructure and their ability to disparage it,” said Jim Martin, president of Free State Press. “But states don’t have to feed this vicious cycle any longer. I am proud that our leaders have voted for the tap by kicking bottled water out of the Maryland State House and state office buildings.”
Maryland is the sixth state to kick the bottle. Connecticut, Vermont, New York, Colorado and Illinois have already cut bottled water spending. These states are supported by 140 cities, hundreds of businesses, dozens of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals nationwide that are supporting public water systems by bucking the bottle.
A study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors suggests that closing the tap investment gap could create tens of thousands of jobs, and help generate tens of billions of dollars in GDP. Conversely, bottled water has a range of costs to taxpayers. For example, each year cities and states pay at least $42 million to dispose of plastic water bottles.
“During these tough economic times our government should be spending scarce public dollars on projects that provide vital public services and grow the economy at large, not just the coffers for a handful of private corporations,” said Kristin Urquiza, Think Outside the Bottle director at Corporate Accountability International. “Investment in public water is, in this respect, one of the wisest investments we can make. We encourage other state leaders to follow the example set by Gov. O’Malley and mayors across the state.”
The decision to phase out spending on bottled water was an action item of the Maryland Green Purchasing Committee, a committee established by the Department of Natural Resources when O’Malley signed into law the Green Maryland Act of 2010. The announcement came in response to the groundswell of public support mobilized for such official actions by Corporate Accountability International supporters across the state.
For more information, click here.
—————
Corporate Accountability International (formerly Infact) is a membership organization that has, for the last 34 years, successfully advanced campaigns protecting health, the environment and human rights. Think Outside the Bottle is Corporate Accountability International’s national campaign to promote, protect and ensure public funding for the nation’s public water systems.
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.