Members of the Water Crisis Coalition protested outside Coca Cola Peninsula Beverages on 19 February.
Members of the Water Crisis Coalition protested outside Coca Cola Peninsula Beverages (CCPB) in Parow yesterday (19 Feb), asking why the company was able to use over one million litres of water every day despite severe water rationing of households in Cape Town.
Capetonians are rationed to 55 litres of water a day because of the severe drought.
“We are not here for Coca Cola’s charity,” said Shanel Johannes, from the coalition, which has over 80 member organisations. “We are not asking for discounts on their products. We are asking why they are continuing to use so much water when there is such a shortage.”
Coalition member Shaheed Mahomed added: “The only thing that Coke is doing is offering a discount on their bottled water. But bottled water is not a solution. Poor households can’t afford bottled water and they are being fitted with water meters that cut off their water.
“We have given Coca Cola until next Monday to come up with a plan of how they are going to get water to poor communities in the Northern Cape and the Eastern Cape, and Bishop Lavis, Tafelsig and Khayelitsha in Cape Town.”
CCPB’s monthly consumption equates to around 13.3 Olympic swimming pools, and Coca Cola says that it currently uses almost two litres of water to make a litre of Coke.
Meanwhile, two members of an engineering firm contracted by the City of Cape Town to audit the city’s biggest water users, said that CCPB was the eight biggest consumer of water in the city.
The men, who declined to be identified, were checking the company’s water meters and had already identified a leak in one water meter a few metres from the company’s main entrance.
“They are currently using about 1.1-million litres of water a day,” said the one man, adding that his company’s task was to fit instruments to the biggest consumers’ water systems that would pinpoint leaks.
The leaking water meter outside Coca Cola Peninsula Beverages.
Priscilla Urquhart, Public Affairs and Communications Manager at CCPB, said that the company used “an average of around 530-million litres annually”, the equivalent of a day’s supply of water for the entire city.
“The WCC presented some interesting proposals around providing water to communities in need, around the Cape Flats and possibly the Northern Cape. We also discussed various other scenarios including CCPB’s commitment to providing water to old age homes, hospitals, schools under the guidance of the Disaster Management Team, in the eventuality of Day Zero,” added Urquhart.
“The WCC was heartened to learn that we have already discounted our bottled water products. The bottled water products we sell, Bonaqua and Valpre, is produced outside the Western Cape and brought via road freight to distribute locally.”
The coalition and the company will meet again in a week’s time. – Health-e News.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
WATER CASE STUDY: Parys residents say their tap water is dirty and stinks like rotten eggs, and experts say it’s because of sewage going into the Vaal River.
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.