Skip to content

Ban the bottle

Toronto teens Anjali and Sonali Menezes are on a mission to stop the privatization of water sources. That includes both bottled water companies and those interested in purchasing public water utilities.
200412_HU_Bottled_Water_4
Sisters and TAP H20 co-founders Anjali and Sonali Menezes gave a presentation about their organization, which is against the privatization of water, at the 2012 Students Leading Student Conference April 17. They tried to get the teens attending the presentation to see if they could tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. Photo by Heidi Ulrichsen.
Toronto teens Anjali and Sonali Menezes are on a mission to stop the privatization of water sources. That includes both bottled water companies and those interested in purchasing public water utilities.

The sisters, who make up two-thirds of a set of triplets, are the founders of an organization called Teens Against the Privatization of Water, or TAP H20.

They say the unsightly plastic bottles which fill up landfill sites and litter roadsides aren't the only problem with bottled water. When companies bottle water, they're usually shipping it out of the local water table.

“Where we're looking at the source of water that is bottled in plastic water bottles, very often it's in springs and wells and different areas of the world which that plastic water bottle company has bought,” Anjali said.

“That's a source of water that's no longer available to the local residents to water their crops, or wash their clothes or use in their cooking.

They're sucking water out of the water tables and putting it into plastic water bottles.”

Often, bottled water comes from municipal water sources, including some in Ontario, she said, which means that people are paying for their water twice.

In terms of the privatization of water utilities, Anjali gives the example of South Africa. When former president Nelson Mandela took power, he vowed to help lift the country out of poverty by privatizing many of its resources, she said.

“International corporations who are looking to privatize water utilities pay huge amounts of money to the country or to municipalities to buy their water sources,” Anjali said.

“When the water was privatized in south Africa, many people could no longer afford water. It actually supposedly led to one of the largest
outbreaks of cholera is South Africa's recent history.

“Because so many people could no longer afford to turn on their tap and drink clean water anymore, they had to drink it from the closest lake or river or pond, where that water contained cholera.”

The sisters gave a recent presentation on the privatization of water at the 2012 Students Leading Students Conference.

The April 16-17 conference, which had the theme “stand up, speak out,” was attended by members of the Rainbow District School Board student senate.

It was designed to help them learn about ways they can help their classmates make a difference in the world.

Other speakers besides the TAP H20 founders included Sylvie Patenaude-Renaud of the Sudbury and District Health Unit, who spoke about contributing to a healthy community, Sunjay Nath on the ABCs of student leadership and Mary Ali and Darla Barnes of the Inner City Home Food Bank on local poverty and hunger.

The Menezes sisters, who graduated from high school last year, but took a year off before attending university in part to promote their cause, got the idea for TAP H20 after attending a presentation on water privatization last year.

“What struck us was how much we took water for granted,” Sonali said.

“We're from Toronto, and in Toronto we have such easy access to tap water. Over 780 million people in the world lack access to clean, safe, affordable drinking water, and here we are in Toronto, where we have access to it, and we weren't supporting it, and drinking bottled water.”

They tried to get their friends at Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School to join their new group. Unfortunately, not many of their friends were interested in the cause.

Sonali created an art installation which featured mug shots of their friends and the caption “charged with apathy.”

“It was sort of criminalizing the act of not caring about water privatization,” she said. “I think it appealed to a lot of people. There was that sort of a humorous aspect to it, but at the same time it was a serious topic.”

Eventually their cause caught on. They convinced many students to think about drinking tap water instead of bottled water.

The sisters even managed to get the Toronto Catholic District School Board to vote to ban bottled water by this fall.

However, the school board might want to renege on this policy, they say. The sisters were due to talk to the school board about the future of the bottled water ban April 19.

Anjali said she'd love it if those attending the Students Leading Students conference walked away from their presentation wanting to learn more about water privatization.

“We feel that when students take on their own role and do their own research, they become even more motivated than they would by anyone telling them what to think.”

Oshani Amaratunga, a Lockerby Composite School student who acts as the chair of the Rainbow District School Board's student senate, said she's inspired by the Menezes sisters' work.

“Ever since I learned about this, I have not purchased a plastic water bottle,” she said. “I've spoken to the student senate, and they feel just as passionate about it.”

To learn more about TAP H20, visit www.main.tapthatwater.org.

Posted by Arron Pickard

Comments

Verified reader

If you would like to apply to become a verified commenter, please fill out this form.




Heidi Ulrichsen

About the Author: Heidi Ulrichsen

Read more