Dear bottled water activists,

On May 7th 2008, PepsiCo shareholders and executives assembled in Plano, Texas for the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting, where water justice activists continued to demand that Pepsi stop hiding behind its greenwashing rhetoric. For example, Pepsi CEO Indra K. Nooyi is a signator to the UN Global Compact’s CEO Water Mandate, a voluntary non-binding agreement designed to portray corporations as environmental stewards of the world’s water. Yet, the main aim of the CEO Water Mandate is to secure more control over water resources and services around the world for corporations involved in the water business. PepsiCo, the fourth largest food and beverage company in the world, depends on securing access to water sources for its very existence. It is also one of the largest producers of bottled water in the U.S. and Canada.

PepsiCo’s largest bottling company, The Pepsi Bottling Group, Inc., has bottling plants that extract billions of litres of water from municipal tap systems to produce their beverages including their flagship bottled water brand, Aquafina. PepsiAmericas, Inc., the second largest PepsiCo bottling company, also produces Aquafina. Last summer, in what was a major embarrassment, PepsiCo was forced to admit the fact that Aquafina is actually tap water, although the company has yet to make this clear on product labels.

PepsiCo also does not inform the public about the amount of water they take each day from municipal tap systems.
Please sign the petition below calling on The Pepsi Bottling Group and PepsiAmericas to own up as to how much water they are taking from public water systems. Please follow the instructions (adding a personal note if you wish) and the petition will be sent directly to both PepsiCo bottling companies.

In solidarity,
Zoe Maggio, Polaris Institute

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Petition for The Pepsi Bottling Group, Inc., and PepsiAmericas, Inc., to Produce Annual Water Taking Reports to the Public

TO: Eric J. Foss, President and CEO, The Pepsi Bottling Group, Inc.
Major institutional shareholders and mutual fund holders of The Pepsi Bottling Group, Inc.

Address:

The Pepsi Bottling Group, Inc.
1 Pepsi Way
Somers , NY 10589-2201

AND Robert C. Pohlad, Chairman and CEO, PepsiAmericas, Inc.
Major institutional shareholders and mutual fund holders of PepsiAmericas, Inc.

Address:

PepsiAmericas, Inc.
4000 Dain Rauscher Plaza
60 South Sixth Street
Minneapolis, MN 55402

Given that water is a resource necessary to life, and given that the global demand for water is surging while supply is eroding , we, the people of Canada and the United States, petition the President and CEO of Pepsi Bottling Group, Inc., and the Chairman and CEO of PepsiAmericas, Inc. to release annual plant water taking reports to the public.

We want to know: [1] how much water each PepsiCo plant takes from the local water supply for each one of Pepsi’s beverage products each day; [2] how much PepsiCo pays for the water from municipal sources on a plant by plant basis: and [3] how PepsiCo processes and tests water quality at each plant throughout North America.

We call on major institutional shareholders and mutual fund holders with investments in PepsiCo to support the people in requesting that PepsiCo produce these reports in good faith.