About...

One Bottle Project (1bottleproject) is a student-run grass roots movement against the 'corporatization' of water in Montreal as well as the entire Quebec region.

Our mission

Why take on bottled water?

Bottled water is the commercialization of a public resource that life depends on.
Bottled water uses much more resources than the water itself: oil for plastic production; oil for transportation; more water than the bottle contains to cool the plastic.
Bottled water is a scam. Most bottled water is public drinking water. You are paying an order of magnitude for a public resource.

What is the situation in Quebec?

Quebec is currently lagging behind other provinces with regards to plastic bottle waste. Toronto has in recent years implemented a campaign against bottled water, and has even gone as far as proposing a bill to ban the sales of it in city buildings.
Many schools currently have exclusivity contracts with major beverage companies (usually Pepsi or Coca-Cola), and this also applies to the sales of bottled water. With bottled water vending machines common in these public institutions, the availability of free water from water fountains is sometimes overlooked.
Quebec, like most Canadian provinces, is exceptionally rich in water resources. These resources should remain public and should not be allowed to be tapped by private companies who sell the water back to the public.
28% of Quebec citizens use bottled water as their primary source of drinking water. This number is exceptionally high for a province that is so rich in water resources.

What can be done?

Educate the public about the stark realities of bottled water.
Tell your friends and family about the dire need to cut down the consumption of plastic water bottles and to keep water from being controlled by private corporations.
Print and spread our posters and sticker media, provided on this website.

Some statistics

graph According to Statistics Canada, 28% of Quebec residents use bottled water as their primary source of drinking water (this is close to the national average of 30%). This number is extremely disturbing since Canada is one of the most water-rich countries in the world (1% of the earth's water is fresh, 20% of that water is in Canada and only 9% of that is renewable), and there is no reason for any Canadian citizen to be drinking bottled water during normal daily practice.

The consumption of bottled water encourages the privatization of water. Bottled water is a rapidly growing market and the major beverage companies are all heavily vested in it. Why sell soda or juice products when you can simply bottle the filtered water from the factory! Pepsi (Aquafina) and Coca-Cola (Dasani) have admitted to doing just this. Their water is simply repackaged public drinking water, filtered and sold back to you. At prices sometimes approaching 2.50$ a litre or more, bottled water can be more expensive than gasoline!

Bottled water also causes needless strain on the planet's resources. The production of the bottles requires oil. The transportation causes a further need for oil. The production of the plastic requires more water than the bottle itself contains (it takes 3 litres of water to produce a 1 litre bottle)... all this to repackage a resource we have in enormous quantities! It just doesn't make sense to drink bottled water in Canada.

Hard facts about bottled water

The global consumption of bottled water in 2004 was 154 billion litres, which is an increase of 57% from 1999.
Bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more than tap water and, at prices sometimes approaching $2.50 a litre, can be more expensive than gasoline.
It takes up to 3 litre of water to cool the plastic required to make a 1 litre bottle.
28% of household water consumed in Quebec is bottled (30% in all of canada).

Points of interest

Quebec's public drinking water is on par (or better) than the quality of bottled water, because it is subject to stricter laws.
A lot of bottled water, especially from large corporations such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, is public drinking water filtered and repackaged.

Important facts of note

17 million barrels of oil was needed to produce 1 million tons of PET (the material used to fabricate plastic bottles) in 2006. This is the equivalent of fueling 1 million cars for a full year.
Coca-Cola (Dasani) and Pepsi (Aquafina) use municipal public drinking water as their source.
Several independent studies have found chemical concentrations of arsenic, mercury and e. coli in bottled water.
Of the 282 bottling plants in Canada only 16 were inspected over the last 12 months (6%). Unlike tap water, the water bottle industry is practically unregulated.
1 billion bottles of water are consumed by Canadians every year. It takes 3 litres of water to produce an empty 1 litre plastic bottle.
Quebec produces 63 000 tones of plastic containers every year. Only 32% of this is recycled (approximately 20,000 tonnes), the rest goes into landfills or the ocean.
Bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more than public tap water