Dear editor,
John B. Challinor ll, director of corporate affairs for the Nestle Corporation, had many statistics to throw around against North Island College’s new reusable bottle water-filling station.
It is extremely touching how concerned he is about the lack of academic performance that will occur when students can no longer buy bottled water on campus and will be encouraged to use water fountains and refilling stations full of free public water. He states info from a study “a mere two-per-cent drop in body water can trigger short-term fuzzy memory, trouble with basic math and difficulty focusing…”
It makes one ponder how did civilization ever advance without a plastic bottle of Nestle’s water by the side of every citizen? How did poor Albert Einstein ever figure out the Theory of Relativity or Thomas Edison invent the light bulb with their dehydrated brains?
In fact, how did any middle-aged person ever make it through university and work in challenging careers when bottled water didn’t even exist?
The facts that John B. Challinor ll does not quote are that Nestle has mastered the marketing of its products by creating need when none exists and successfully convincing consumers their products are indispensable.
The saddest example of this is Nestle’s international campaign aimed at Third World mothers to switch from breast feeding to Nestle’s infant formula when it was proven that the babies had over a six-times-higher survival rate if exclusively breast-fed for six months.
Nestle’s tactics made the World Health Organization set new marketing rules against these marketing practices. Another fact is the growing Pacific Trash Vortex full of plastic particulate suspended in the upper water column with an estimated size larger than Canada or eight per cent of the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
We are learning that plastic is a substance that never really goes away. Perhaps Mr. Challinor ll and Nestle could help with this problem before selling more single-use plastic for a non-existent need.
L. Krainer,
Courtenay
