It is rather strange that your article ‘Borehole driller gets environment award’ (10 January) failed to elicit comments. Stranger still is the total absence of any government reaction regarding the revelation that General Soft Drinks extracts 51,000 cubic metres of water for free from its boreholes.
GDS even admits of getting the water it needs from its three registered boreholes. Which obviously means that this business firm is extracting a huge quantity of groundwater for free with the government’s permission. The quantity extracted is, of course, provided by GSD which is introduced in the article as a “bottler for Coca-Cola and producer of Kristal table-water”.
Wonder of wonders, the chairman of the Cleaner Technology Centre makes known that “the adjudicating board (of the University institute) was not aware that the company (GDS) extracts water from boreholes.” He, believe it or not, added also “it actually is the company that applied for the environment award and provided the relevant information.”
Perhaps that is why the University institute defends the choice of GSD for the award. Some award! Bottling Coca-Cola costs more in terms of water than bottling table-water as explained in the book ‘Big Business’ by John Madeley (Zed Books 2008) where one reads what follows in the section headed ‘Soft drinks: Coca-Cola’ (pp. 59-63):
“Making Coca-Cola needs a lot of water. It takes almost three litres of water to make one litre of Coca-Cola. To have enough water, Coca-Cola is increasingly taking over control of aquifers in communities around the world. In Coca-Cola’s pursuit of water to make the drink, people are suffering water shortages, farmers’ wells are drying up and local agriculture is being damaged. The company’s bottling plant in Placimada in Kerala state (India) began operation in 2000 but aroused such fierce opposition from people affected that it was forced to close in 2004. Coca-Cola drawing 350,000 litres of groundwater a day for this unit.”
All this besides other astounding information about the damage to the environment.
In box listing GSD’s efficiency measures one reads about the ‘detailed breakdown of environmentally friendly measures’ such as: “The car parks are equipped with oil and solid interceptors to make sure any oil is trapped before being sent to the government waste-water treatment plant”.
However, as stated above in the cited book “it takes almost three litres of water to make one litre of Coca-Cola” but no mention is made of how the quantity of waste groundwater used in the production of Coca-Cola by GSD is disposed of. This is just one of the other many reasons why the University institute, the adjudicating board and even the chairman of the Cleaner Technology Centre would do well to read the section indicated of the above-described book.
If a market economy cannot subsidise, for economic and social reasons, the new high electricity and water tariffs – how come a commercial company can extract huge quantities of groundwater from three registered boreholes for free to produce and sell table-water and Coca-Cola?
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