Tapped

This enlightening, competently investigated and imperative documentary with a fantastic opening titles sequence seizes the various health and environmental concerns associated with the privatization of water. Bottled water corporations make masses of proceeds every year, but are they entitled to exhaust a small town's water supply without previous permission and without restoring it? Fryebyrg, Maine, endured a water famine while, in tandem, Coca-Cola continued to pump their already deficient supply. It's revealed that the bottled water industry is unregulated and causes health hazards. Tap water, however, is thoroughly regulated. Municipalities test water for toxins nonstop every day.

Director Stephanie Soechtig jabs acutely at the predicament of water with specific and vital insights, eschewing disproportionate use of talking heads. For instance, I feel like I should've already known that the Pacific has a portion overflowing with plastic. Numerous corporations employ the chemical BPA to make their bottles, a neurotoxin that potentially causes various neurological disorders. There's no denying that any and every form of growth are all endangered when science and law mingle with misinformation and materialism. At least documentaries like Tapped appear every so often to nurture awareness, to notify the people and clear the daze of party lines. Whether or not Tapped will help to heal the public's indifference toward progress and environmental causes is a different affair.

Tapped does to bottled water manufacturing what Food, Inc. and Super Size Me did to food monopolies. It's an exposé of champion reporting. Some will likely put the propaganda label on Tapped however, and one could split those hairs, insomuch as it's predisposed to a certain alliance. But the information is indisputable, unlike the propaganda of today that functions to make us believe what its makers don't believe themselves. Tapped joins the crusade to battle corporate Goliaths who have milked local water supplies to sell it in toxic bottles, sometimes during droughts that constrain towns to rigorously limit their own water use.

We're first brought to Fryeburg, where one day, their standard of living is as it's been for generations, and the next day enormous trucks roll in. Without any prior communication, Nestle just silently procured land to tap for water, and since then they've been rolling those trucks in and out, extracting from the local spring but paying no taxes to recover the community. And unlike other trades, they're not even required to purchase resources to make their product, save for those plastic bottles, made by petroleum factories with cancer-causing constituents.

All effective modern documentaries seem to need statistical facts presented in graphic design effects to give their allegations a source. And in an age of instant gratification, they must. Conservative Libertarians want to know what's wrong with someone making a buck? Well, just 1% of the water that envelops 75% of the planet is drinkable. A year before this documentary was finished, there was a drought in 35 of 50 States. No water, no life. The first words said in Tapped are, "By 2030, two-thirds of the world will not have access to clean drinking water."

During a Raleigh drought, Pepsi kept hauling over 400,000 gallons a day. How are such reckless actions possible in a democracy? Well, the FDA, we gather from intense footage of Senate hearings, relies on tests run by the companies themselves! Meanwhile, one FDA pen-pusher is accountable for supervision of the entire industry. Put in close-up and faced with facts, we ultimately even hear the FDA publicist telling Soechtig that if he'd known this was the course the interview was to take, he wouldn't have agreed to grant the interview. Why does the FDA even need a publicist?

A visit to Corpus Christi familiarizes us with residents who live within miles of the factory producing the plastic bottles used by the big three water manufacturers. All have health troubles. The more you watch, the more scared and livid you become. American industry has been reduced to a criminal kingdom over the last thirty years, but the bottled water industry has clearly avoided greater scrutiny. Hopefully, that's changing. It all boils down to water as a rudimentary birthright, a raw material owned by us all. If you begin commodifying bare essentials of life in such a way as to make it harder for people to get to them, you have the footing for grave political volatility.

This incredibly shocking documentary and the similar documentary BLUE GOLD (2008, see my review), made by a different team, need to be seen by anyone interested in whether the human species will survive. (One would think all humans would be interested in this question, but so stupid are some people, that they actually are not interested, which is perhaps why our survival is really under threat, namely that the human species contains such a very large proportion of idiots.) It used to be said of a boring person that he was 'like a long drink of water'. Well, the ways things are going, long drinks of water are going to be in such short supply that we'll never be able to use that expression again. This film, unlike BLUE GOLD, limits itself to the United States and the Pacific Ocean. The film shows in detail that public water is being taken by big corporations like Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi-Cola at the rate of millions of gallons per day, bottled, and then sold back to us as 'bottled water' at 10,000 times profit. And the idiot politicians who allow this seem to think it is OK, perhaps because their wallets have increased by 10,000 times as well for being 'friendly' to the ruthless corporations. The toothless, useless Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only one member of staff working half-time on the regulation of bottled water production in America! 70% of all bottled water in the USA is sold within the same state, so does not come under federal jurisdiction anyway. The remaining 30% is required to be tested, but the test results are not required to be filed with the FDA or divulged to anyone, and can remain secret within the private files of the corporations. So while municipal free water supplies are tested sometimes as often as 400 times a day, bottled water is effectively never tested. It often contains dangerous chemicals and contaminants. Since 1989 when bottled water began to become available in plastic bottles, which are made from petroleum at refineries, the bottled water for sale has often been full of deadly carcinogenic chemicals leeching out of the plastic into the water. The main dangerous chemicals are PET, PETE, and BPA (bisphenol A). Of these, BPA is the deadliest. So what does this mean? It means that water which is free (70% of all bottled water in the USA comes from municipal free water supplies and not from springs or wells!) is taken in gigantic quantities by large corporations, bottled in poisonous plastic bottles, and then sold to the public at a huge profit under the phoney pretext that it is 'safe' (but if municipal water is 'unsafe', why is 70% of bottled 'safe' water merely 'unsafe water' in a poisonous bottle?). But that is not the end of the story. The bottles are then all thrown away and make their way onto beaches and into the oceans. This is billions of plastic bottles per year. The Pacific Ocean for instance has a huge area larger than Texas known as a gyre which is just a vast sea of plastic. Every ocean has at least one such gyre. All the fish and other wildlife (turtles, seabirds, etc.) of the oceans are being killed by the plastic. In other words, bottled water is now one of the greatest threats to the planet, but even more urgently, it is one of the greatest threats to people. Don't you think it would be ironic if the human species ceased to exist because of bottled water? Wouldn't that just be the funniest of all cosmic jokes? For a species as stupid as humans, this is only fitting, that they should die with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with a pathetic, feeble gurgle. This film was produced by the same people who made WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? (2006). The directors of this one are Stephanie Soechtig and Jason Lindsey, both of whom also co-wrote it with Josh David. They clearly had a much bigger budget and team than the people who made BLUE GOLD. Both films and their DVD 'extras' need to be seen together. They do not duplicate, but rather they complement, each other. And I shall here add something which I included in my review of BLUE GOLD: As Ford Madox Ford said in the February, 1924, issue of The Transatlantic Review, of which he was editor: 'That one should stand by and observe without a note of warning the sure shadow of doom engulfing a civilisation would be to display an equanimity passing the power of most men.'

I live in a major city. My tap water sometimes has unacceptable levels of fecal coliforms so they add so much chlorine when i take a shower my throat burns. Research the epidemic of prescription meds in tap water, municipalities are not equipped to remove them. I agree there are problems but trying to demonize everyone won't truly solve problems. Wish you had done more balanced report. In one part they claim water is shipped out of state then when they criticize FDA they say most of the water stays in state. They don't discuss job creation and local economic concerns. Also if this is such a huge industry, there is a need being met. My tap doesn't exist 3 hours from home and I'm not carrying a day's water supply on my back everywhere I go. No alternatives were presented.

Documentary about water resources being stolen from a small town in Maine. It is incredibly sad to learn how awful this situation is for both the residents of the town and for conservation efforts in the area. Water mining affects the water table in local areas, and is free to do in Maine and other states, making it economically beneficial for companies to pump water and sell it for profit.... there should be better legislation to avoid this. No amount of strikes or protests will change anything. There needs to be structural changes in how companies take resources to account for environmental changes and how taking resources affects the local community.

Now it's not that film is anything great it just presents a lot of facts that you would think most people would already know about. I have probably bought bottled water maybe a dozen times in my entire life. It was only when there was no other option to get any other sort of water or I needed a bottle to fill up w/ god forbid tap water! I cannot understand for the life of me why Bottled water is a business at all. It is after all nothing more than a giant scam. It simply amazes me that this is a $10 billion dollar or more industry. How is this possible? There is a great "Penn & Teller Bull-Sh*t" that proves just what a joke it really is. They test a bunch of people drinking bottled waters against regular ol' tap water & guess what 8/10 of them went for the tap water! The thing that will upset you the most is the way the "Nestle" company continued to bottle water in Maine, while they are in the middle of a drought! So basically these people all had to ration there water so that "Nestle" could continue to bottle their water. Now I understand to a certain extent the companies side too, because it's a huge boon to them considering they are upping the price by 9,999% so it's an obvious cash cow. Plus you have to imagine even if it is a joke people are buying it & it must help w/jobs & w/the local economy too. Overall it seems really stupid, but there are good arguments on both sides of the fence.