A lot of folks have begun to notice that burning oil to ship heavy gallons of spring water from all over the world to a country that has more drinkable, municipally supplied water than anywhere else on the globe is nonsensical.

Tons of petroleum are converted to plastic (most of which is not recycled) to hold spring water that is often not any healthier to drink (and sometimes less so) than tap water. Most importantly, over a billion people worldwide do not have access to reliable and clean drinking water. Water will very soon be a precious resource, more scare and more valuable than oil. That’s why shipping clean drinking water out of places without a municipal water supply to the US, which has plenty of water to go around, is capricious and just plain wrong.

Adding insult to injury, it’s come to light recently that Coke and Pepsi's bottled waters, Dasani and Aquafina, (some of the most popular on the market) do not even use spring water. Instead, Coke and Pepsi simply bottle the tap water in whatever municipality their plant is located. While it is more responsible to drink tap water than spring water, the fact that the soft drink giants have been spending millions on marketing to get people to turn off the tap and open their wallets for the same exact product is an egregious offense.

Dasani and Aquafina dominate the bottled water market and they do it with our water supply. However, the success of Aquafina and Dasnai point to a real opportunity. That's why once you get past seeing red about this, maybe like me, you’ll see green.

Philadelphia needs to either bottle and sell its own water or raise taxes on Coke and Pepsi to capture a much bigger share of their profit on the sale of our water.

As poverty grows in Philadelphia, it’s important we increase funding to after school programs, anti-violence initiatives, schools, rec centers, health centers, libraries and more. Raising wages/creating jobs or increasing taxes are the most direct ways to come up with extra funds. However, water is one of many ways that we can raise smaller amounts of revenue easily and painlessly.

The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) started bottling tap water earlier this year and it gives away cases of the stuff, for free, to local non-profit groups. There was a detailed article about this in the City Paper, which you can read here.

Why not go head to head with Dasnai and Aquafina (we know our product will taste the same) and sell Philly Tap at every corner store, in every Wawa, 7-11, etc, through out the region?

While I worry that the cost of expanding this operation might be cumbersome, if the PWD did bottle and sell enough water to compete with Coke and Pepsi, we’d have the advantage of being able to drastically under price them. An http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/cms/page1379.cfm “>Inquirer story on Pepsi and Coke’s misleading marketing of their water products quotes Joan Przybylowicz, from the PWD who says that:

a gallon of the city's tap water costs about one-half cent. By comparison, a half gallon of Dasani can be had for $1.59.

If PWD bottled and sold its own water, even if they sold the product for 50 cents a bottle, we’d still collect a ton of revenue we don’t currently have

There is plenty of demand after all.

According to the Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Company website, our local plant is the fourth largest nationwide with over half a billion dollars in annual sales. Both Pepsi and Coke have reported that bottled water sales are among the fastest growing in their companies and may soon catch up or even overtake the sale of carbonated beverages. That means there are a lot of potential water consumers in Philadelphia.

The simpler way to profit off of water is to tax Pepsi and Coke at a higher rate for their water usage. I had some trouble figuring out the PWD’s business tax rate (hello Philadelphia, can we get some good city websites up or what?), but for consumers, it costs about $17 in taxes for 600 gallons of water. Philly Coke’s website says it serves about 5 million consumers a year. If one-third of these people buy one 20 oz. bottle of water a year, we’re talking at least 278,437 gallons of water sold annually.

I don’t really care how we make money off of water, but the point here is that in these cash strapped times, we are stupid if we don’t.

Our water supply is currently being exploited by Coke and Pepsi. As the largest municipality collecting and cleaning water for drinking in the region, Coke and Pepsi can’t really get the tap water they need for Dasani and Aquafina anywhere else but Philly (and shipping tap water from other places would likely cut too deeply into their bottom line). That means that whether we tax them more, or bottle our own water, Philadelphia is in a good place to be able to better take advantage of a natural resource.

I hope that presumptive Mayor Nutter and new and old members of Council realize this get to work as soon as possible raising new revenue from water.