Could Someone Be Stealing Your Groundwater

Legalized Stealing

Did you know our precious ground water is being depleted for the express purpose of lining the pockets of big industry? Nestle is one of the biggest offenders as you can see from this recent post by MintPressNews.com. California is in one of the largest droughts they have ever seen and Nestle is sucking 80 million gallons of water out of their aquifers and selling it back to them! Hell they are even going into Canada and stealing it from them, you can read about it here. I’m not sure where the bottled water craze started but it is becoming one of the biggest ecological problems of this century. Were we the people really responsible for it just because of the convenience? That’s what I would like to talk about today, its been on my mind for some time and I feel we all have to do something about it.

Is There a Solution?

If we did in fact cause it for no other reason than convenience shame on us. What did we do before the “bottled water”? Brought water with us if we thought we would need it of course. It really would be that easy to stop this ecological mess. Big business would stop sucking the water out of our aquifers because it would be the old supply & demand routine, nobody buying, stop producing it. I guess the question comes down to is there enough of us willing to stop buying this product?

It used to be if we wanted to carry water with us we would simply use a container, fill it with water and bring it with us, why can’t we do that now? There is so much wrong with bottled water it boggles the mind. From the oil it takes to make millions of these bottles to businesses stealing local water supplies, it has to stop.

The Devastating Effect on Our Environment

First of all the companies that are supplying the water are going into states and drilling down into the aquifer and draining them, here is yet another example in Florida. There have been reports of sink holes appearing and whole houses being lost down the hole. The worst part is it took millions of years for these underwater aquifer’s to become what they are, its part of our earth and the way it works. It is part of nature and we all need them, plants, animals and humans. I’m surely not a scientist but it does not take much of an imagination to think about what might happen if we deplete these.

There are many examples of these companies move into a location, negotiate a deal with the authorities and start pumping water at little to no cost. The residents get nothing, the town might get a small payment but in some cases get nothing and the company that is doing the drilling gets to sell a product that cost them almost zero to produce and sell it for huge obscene profits. What the hell’s wrong with this picture?

If this scenario isn’t bad enough, we now have the millions of bottles that have to be produced to put the water in. Holy Christmas, this is just as bad as the problem of sucking our aquifers dry. Many of these empty bottles end up in our land fills, on the side of the road and in our rivers. This problem has really become a ecological nightmare, we must stop it.

How, just stop buying the water. Is it really to much trouble to just buy a few water containers, walk over to our facets and fill them up when we are going out? Have we become that lazy? The gym where I go has installed a water station that you can fill up your water bottle and it has a counter on it that tells us how many plastic water bottles we have saved by doing this. In one gym the counter is well over 50,000 and it has been installed less than a year. Imagine if all gyms did this. Imagine if we all did this. Imagine if no one bought bottled water any more. The depletion of our sacred aquifer’s would be saved.

Ways to Help

Our goal at Ink & Toner Solutions is to help in any way we can with recycling and reusing products. We reuse spent printer cartridges which helps keep them out of the landfill and saves millions of gallons of oil each year. In our Northampton Computer Repair store we strongly advise of repairing computers and printers rather than buy new for as long as possible. We are in the process of launching a new program that will allow consumers to lease to own their own laptops and tablets which is not a new idea but what is new is we will only offer refurbished machines. Again this will save on so many resources which is what we have to all think about going forward.
We are looking for new ideas revolving around conserving, recycling and reusing. Please give us your feedback and ideas you may have on solutions to these global problems. We really are in this all together, none of us will be insulated when water runs out or it has become so scarce and precious that big business will be charging us outrageous amounts for every drop. But that’s another post in and of itself.