Message in a Bottle

I have never quite grasped the concept of bottled water. Why not drink tap water or use those simple filters that can be attached to your tap? Is it ‘cool’ to drink bottled water? Safer? Purer? Convenient? Tastier? I remember when I used to go out on hikes, we used to drink flowing spring water in the mountains. The purest water you could drink – our group leaders used to say – and we drank it, enjoying the cool, pure water, not worrying about the ‘nutritional facts label’ or the fact that someone could be peeing in it upstream. Point is, I think it’s all a matter of perspective. What’s the need for bottled water? Especially in areas where you get perfectly safe drinking water right through your tap.What started out as a mildly irritating topic for me (because of the false lavishness and wastefulness involved) is a much bigger issue than I had imagined. Bottled water is a $15 billion industry in the US and about $50 billion world wide. Read an interesting piece ‘Message in a Bottle.‘ Some mind numbing excerpts:

Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, US spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than it spent on iPods or movie tickets - $15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year.

This is huge! So why do we drink bottled water so much? Is it safer? Purer?

Pepsi (NYSE:PEP) has the nation's number-one-selling bottled water, Aquafina, with 13% of the market. Coke's (NYSE:KO) Dasani is number two, with 11% of the market. Both are simply purified municipal water--so 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi for our convenience. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35.

My tennis buddy always drinks Propel ‘Fitness’ Water (by Gatorade) when we play – you guessed it – tennis. Other times, he will usually grab an Aquafina. He obviously thinks drinking ‘Propel’ will somehow help him play better or at the very least hydrate him better than ‘regular’ water. If you need better stamina, how about running a few miles daily? Or better yet, how about you STOP SMOKING? But it’s amazing how the advertisements, branding, marketing can get in your head. There is startling level of thought and analysis involved.

Aquafina marketing vice president Ahad Afridi says his team has done the research to understand what kind of water drinkers we are. They've found six types, including the "water pure-fectionist"; the "water explorer"; the "image seeker"; and the "struggler" ("they don't really like water that much...these are the people who have a cheeseburger with a diet soda").

Impressed? I am. And let’s check out its impact on the environment. Surprise, surprise! Bottled water is bad for the environment

Bottled water wastes fossil fuels and water in production and transport, and when the water is drunk the bottles become a major source of waste. It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Each one of those bottles required nearly five times its volume in water to manufacture the plastic and may have caused the release of nickel, ethylene oxide, and benzene. Then, rather than being recycled, 86 percent of them are thrown away. Breaking down these plastics can take thousands of years, while their components seep into our water supplies. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day spins out more than a million bottles daily. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

So what’s the Message in a Bottle?

Bottled water is not a sin. But it is a choice. Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the car cup holders--that happens because of a fundamental thoughtlessness. It's only marginally more trouble to have reusable water bottles, cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the fridge. We just can't be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that conspicuous consumption of bottled water that we don't need seems wasteful, and perhaps cavalier.

Once you understand the resources mustered to deliver the bottle of water, it's reasonable to ask as you reach for the next bottle, not just "Does the value to me equal the 99 cents I'm about to spend?" but "Does the value equal the impact I'm about to leave behind?"

My personal opinion – in areas where the drinking water is safe, bottled water is simply an unnecessary waste that could be easily avoided.

On a lighter note, read ‘My carbon footprint’.