Dumbshit Dept.

Bottled water from the tap

A number of years ago Andre and I were musing about the quality of the tap water in Hamburg. Of course we were drunk and stumbling along the Reeperbahn (red light district) at the time, but the conversation still holds relevance.

I was complaining about the water quality in the US and how I really missed tap water from Hamburg. So we started thinking if you could bottle the Hamburg tap water and sell it as bottled water in the US. We laughed at the idea and thought about how humorous that would be.

Well, leave it to Coke -- they were selling purified tap water as Dasani bottled water:

First, Coca-Cola's new brand of "pure" bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its "highly sophisticated purification process", based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

Of course as if that was not bad enough, here is more:

So now the full scale of Coke's PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it "pure" and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for "taste profile"; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide - which is not a problem - into bromate - which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre).

Brazen US business practices are now infesting the rest of the world. A sad state of affiairs, I have to admit.

Posted by Mayhem at March 20, 2004 01:10 PM