A Disturbing Message in a Bottle

Bottled water. Sleek, chic and costly — costly in ways many consumers in their breezy pursuit of these products scarcely imagine, according to Charles Fishman’s mammoth article on this mammoth industry in FastCompany.com.

Yes, Virginia, there is a seamy underside to the bottled water phenomenon, Fishman argues.

As recently as the late 1970s, virtually no one could have foreseen the firm cultural footing bottled water eventually would acquire in our everyday lives, particularly in the United States. Fishman describes it as the “food phenomenon of our lives.” Small wonder why: Last year, we spent more on these products than we spent on iPods or movie tickets - a staggering $15 billion. This year’s projections add a billion dollars more to that figure.

“We’ve come to pay good money - two or three or four times the cost of gasoline - for a product we have always gotten and still get, for free, from taps in our homes,” Fishman writes.

And it’s a far from benign indulgence, not only in consumer terms but in the costs it’s imposing on the environment - an imposition that is almost staggering in its magnitude.

Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year - 167 bottles for each person. Yes, these bottles typically are made of totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate plastic, but our recycling rate is only 23 percent, which means that we put roughly 38 billion water bottles in landfills each year - a billion dollars worth of plastic.

Responding to concerns of the more environmentally conscious among us, Nestle Waters recently rolled out its new lighter plastic half-liter bottle - 15 grams of plastic instead of the typical 19 grams, a reduction of 20 percent. But lighter or not, there’s no getting around the fact that the majority of these bottles will end up in landfills rather than recycling bins.

Still, it’s the long-term implications for public drinking water - tap water - that concerns many water experts the most. At Auburn University, Dr. Jim Hairston, the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s water quality coordinator and professor of agronomy and soils, fears the U.S. consumer’s passion for bottled water may divert public attention away from one of the nation’s most pressing infrastructural crises today - the nation’s crumbling public water system.

Americans, Hairston says, simply are not investing enough money in the nation’s public drinking water and waste-water facilities, and until they do, these facilities will continue to creak under the strain. Part of this investment needed to upgrade these facilities necessarily must be passed on to consumers. But given the growing preference for bottled water over ordinary tap water, Hairston fears most consumers simply will be unwilling to bear these costs.

The long-term cost could be the loss of safe, affordable public drinking water - something Hairston considers as one of the nation’s most significant scientific achievements.

Aside from that, the whole bottled water phenomenon is laced with irony, and, as some would contend, a disturbing irony. As Fishman contends, “The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water ‘varieties’ from around the globe, not one of which we actually need.”

We don’t need it because the water that comes out of our taps is every bit as safe, or safer, than the vast majority of bottled water products.

Aside from this, there is another irony, from an ethical standpoint, equally or more disturbing than the environmental costs associated with these products.

For instance, in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory churns out a million bottles of one of the “hippest bottled water” on the U.S. market, amidst a population that does not have safe, reliable drinking water. That’s the irony - it’s easier for Americans in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a “safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water” than most people in Fiji.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at August 8, 2007 09:35 AM