Daniel Jaffee wants you to unbottle your water this year!

“Until we make the tap water trustworthy for everyone, we’re never going to solve this problem and we’re also going to have a massive injustice problem on our hands," Professor Daniel Jaffee.

Bottled water is now the world’s most consumed packaged drink. The $300 billion global market is led by four multinational giants – Nestlé, Danone, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

Meanwhile, one third of the world’s population lacks reliable access to safe drinking water.

Add to that, the global environmental crisis of plastic waste created by the disposal of over 600 billion single-use plastic beverage bottles annually.

In his book, Unbottled: The fight against plastic water and for water justice (2023), Daniel Jaffee deconstructs the impact packaged water is having on transforming drinking water into a profitable commodity that not only undermines public water services, but puts at risk the concept of water as a human right.

Jaffee, Associate Professor of Sociology at Portland State University, sat down with Small Change to discuss his exhaustive research exposing how water issues intersect with social justice inequalities. Jaffee also discovered the vital role local water justice campaigns play in ensuring that water remains in the public commons because water is for life and not profit.

Jaffe told Small Change that the book – which was a decade in the making – “crystalized for me some different ways to think about this material including the linkages to settings like Flint [Michigan] and the contexts of water injustice and insecurity in the States but also thinking about the parallels between Flint and Jackson, Mississippi and Six Nations [Ontario, Canada], and the international context with the global south.”

Jaffee says in some ways the convenience issue of packaged water is easier to tackle than the commodity issue. Class and racial composition of bottled water consumption was traditionally a middle and upper-middle class purchase of convenience. Increasingly, in the United States (US) that is no longer true.

The convenience factor is one of the main reasons people purchase this discretionary good, however ideas of purity, cleanliness and distrust of the tap also play a major role.

“I think the convenience piece is an easier one to combat through policy and through this whole reclaiming the tap set of activities,” explained Jaffee.

Reclaiming the water faucet isn’t that difficult. It means introducing bottled water bans at local government, university and institutional levels. Those bans are easier to enact and enforce when government and institutions create easy access to public water in public spaces through clean, attractive water stations.

That essentially undermines and combats the packaged water industry’s argument that it just too difficult to find drinking water in public spaces.

And, those simple fixes are happening. FirstOntario Centre and Tim Hortons Field in Hamilton, Ontario were each constructed without public access to drinking fountains. The issue at Tim Hortons Field was fixed retroactively because organizers for the 2015 Pam Am Games wanted fans to have access to free water during soccer events.

Suspiciously, no one was able to comment on why the stadium was constructed without public drinking fountains or water filling stations. However, it is generally believed that the 20-year licence agreement giving the Tiger-Cats the bulk of profits from concession sales was influential in the decision.

Jaffee stated that most recent statistics for bottled water sales show the industry views refillable bottles and the demand for refilling stations, apps and networks as taking a huge bite out of industry growth.

In 2022 bottled water sales in the US fell by one per cent. Jaffee says that’s a significant event because the economy was booming. The industry’s market reports reflect that they view refillable bottles as an existential threat to sales and are terrified that Gen Z and millennials are rejecting plastic bottled water while demanding refilling stations.

Canada is still experiencing a substantial population growth and as such the packaged water market is still projected to grow, but around the global north a change is imminent and sales are tapering.

Jaffee believes it’s pretty well proven that upper and middle-income white and Asian households in the US are either walking away from bottled water or at least starting to return to tap water which they trust more.

Conversely, low-income folks and communities of colour are overwhelmingly distrustful of their tap water and with good reason. Statistically, Black and Latino communities distrust tap water because of uneven disinvestment in the US. That’s why they consume more bottled water – even for cooking – despite being the groups who are economically least able to afford that extra cost. Jaffee sees this as a form of water injustice because these communities are paying often unaffordably high prices for their tap water while also paying hundreds to thousands of dollars per year for bottled water.

In the US, seven to eight per cent of water systems have some kind of health violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act annually.

According to Jaffee, “At one level that’s not a lot, but they are disproportionately located in low-income communities, communities of colour, and rural communities with ground water contamination.”

“Until we make the tap water trustworthy for everyone, we’re never going to solve this problem and we’re also going to have a massive injustice problem on our hands,” Jaffee added.

The US has disinvested in its water infrastructure for the past 45 years. Jaffee sees the only solution being massive federal re-investment prioritizing environmental justice communities, Indigenous and communities of colour in an effort to combat historical structural racism and infrastructure neglect.

In Canada, First Nations peoples living on reserve are the folks experiencing water racism. That’s why it’s imperative to invest and restore trust in drinking water infrastructure across the board.

Canada has not legislated the right to water. However, in 2012 it recognized the United Nations (UN) declaration on the human right to safe drinking water. Quebec remains the only jurisdiction in Canada to enshrine the right to water in legislation.

Six Nations of the Grand River, located along the Grand River in Southwestern Ontario, is the largest reserve in Canada by population and the second largest by land mass. Yet, over 91 per cent of households have no access to clean potable water. Instead, many households spend upwards of $2,500 annually buying bottled water.

While Six Nations has the technology to create clean water it lacks the infrastructure to get that potable water to individual homes.

Due to cost, the federal government wants to solve this issue incrementally taking several generations to complete the project – a timeline that would not be tolerated if this was happening in Ottawa or Toronto.

Jaffee believes Indigenous activists defence of land and water sovereignty and treaty rights, injected a transformative and powerful element that was pivotal to the struggles in Cascade Locks, Oregon as well as Wellington County, Ontario — both of which are covered in-depth in his book.

“The alliances between settler and Indigenous activists in both places I see as very powerful and very promising. When Indigenous communities get involved in these struggles, especially invoking treaty rights, there’s the potential to jump scales over local decision-makers to federal, national courts and authorities in claiming treaty rights,” stated Jaffee.

These same alliances also transformed the understanding of settler alliances in both Cascade Locks and Wellington County. In fact, [Wellington] Water Watchers (WW) members say that working with Indigenous partners has revolutionized their thinking to understand the entire water issue as a struggle over much deeper and more powerful issues of decolonization of Indigenous sovereignty and of long-running historical injustices.

WW members have also come to realize that the water protection issue is not only an environmental issue, but also a social justice issue which really changed their thinking and that resulted in pretty transformative outcomes.

“Anywhere that people are essentially dependent on the packaged water industry to survive to get their daily water that’s a red flag for water injustice, and a sign that the human right to water is being abridged or denied,” Jaffee explained.

He added, “For me that helped me dial into a different wave length and see this as a global water injustice and human rights issue.”

We as the people own the water because it is part of the public commons. A corporation should not be able to outbid a township for the rights to the local well. But that is exactly what happened when Nestlé’s outbid Centre Wellington Township for ownership and rights to the Middlebrook well.

The climate crisis is also impacting water work in multiple ways. The world is in a dire climate emergency where the availability of fresh water is becoming dramatically less accessible and available in the very places where it is needed most. Increasing droughts as well as over pumping are contributing to this water decline.

“The packaged water industry, but also the multi-national firms that own those companies, clearly are looking at access to that water as a zero-sum game,” Jaffee said.

“Financialization and speculation in clean water, drinking water is clearly a sign that capital reads a future of diminished access to water and that it is a source of profit. I think we need to be very concerned because whenever a good that is essential for life becomes provided mainly, or entirely, through the market, access becomes based on the ability to pay. And, some per centage of the population is inevitably going to go without. Or, at least, without clean water,” Jaffee added.

When the market seizes public sector water it is open for gouging by the market. That’s why grassroots groups need to fight to keep water in the public commons and the public sphere to ensure basic social justice rights and human survival.

Jaffee is hopeful that there is nothing inevitable about consumer dependency on plastic water either in the global north or the global south.

Jaffee is also confident that we don’t have to accept a two-tired drinking water society because the resources exist as does the will.

“I think we’re at an inflection point right now, at least in the global north, where there’s a substantial movement back to the tap and a cresting of demand for bottled and packaged water among privileged groups in many privileged societies. But there’s this kind of counter trend of increasing distrust and increased consumption of bottled water among the clean water have nots,” Jaffee shared.

It seems there is both promise and peril and that’s why local, grassroots movements like WW offer hope for a just global water future.