Failure™ Magazine

Bottled and Sold

Our costly obsession with bottled water.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Business, Life

Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy—and throw away—a plastic bottle of water. Major corporations like Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo have convinced us to pay a steep price for a commodity—and often the same water—we can get straight from the tap. Our collective attraction to bottled water comes with hidden costs too, many related to producing, transporting, and disposing of the plastic containers that hold that “Arctic” or “Glacier” water, which may very well come from New Jersey, Tennessee, or Texas.

In “Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water” (Island Press), Peter H. Gleick—President of the Pacific Institute and a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for his work on water issues—explores the choices we make about water, and how these choices affect our future. In the following Failure Interview, Gleick—who gets his water from the tap, by the way—explains why so many people have turned to bottled water, and relates the consequences of bottling and selling our most basic necessity.

Is bottled water better or safer than tap water?
I think the assumption people make is that bottled water is better, because we pay a lot more for it than we pay for tap water. But I think that assumption is false. Our tap water, in general, is perfectly safe. Bottled water, in general, is perfectly safe. But in the course of writing “Bottled and Sold,” it became clear to me that tap water is better monitored and better regulated than bottled water, and that we don’t really know what’s in our bottled water. It’s not monitored well and it’s not reported to the public as transparently as tap water quality is. I think we should have better monitoring of both bottled water and tap water, but I don’t think we should assume that bottled water is better.

How much more expensive is bottled water than tap water?
Of course, every bottle is priced a little differently, but a rule of thumb is that it is one- to two- thousand times more expensive.

So why are so many people drinking it?
There are four reasons. One is that people are increasingly afraid of their tap water. Second, people sometimes don’t like the taste of their tap water. Third, water fountains are disappearing and it is increasingly convenient to find bottled water. Finally, we’ve been bombarded by very successful and aggressive advertising campaigns that convince us that bottled water will make us healthier, sexier, thinner, or more stylish.

If your tap water tastes lousy, what’s the best way to address the problem?
There are two issues. Some people think their tap water tastes bad, but it actually doesn’t.  Blind taste test after blind taste test suggests that we can’t actually tell the difference between bottled water and tap water. On the other hand, sometimes tap water does taste bad. The long term answer is that our water agencies ought to provide good-tasting tap water. We have the technology to do that, and we ought to put in place systems to fix the taste. When people don’t like the taste of their tap water, it’s typically because there are too many minerals—too many salts. It’s easy to take some of that stuff out of tap water. That’s what some of the home filters do. I don’t think the home filters are a great idea, but if your tap water tastes bad the short-term solution might be a filter.

Why don’t you like home filters?
They are expensive and typically designed to filter things out—like lead—that aren’t’ usually found in our tap water. Another problem is that you have to replace them, or over time they can actually produce worse quality water than what comes out of the tap.

What information can one glean from the label on a bottle of water?
There are serious problems with bottled water labeling. We don’t get the kind of information that consumers deserve. If it says “spring water” then it is required by federal law to come from a spring or a groundwater aquifer that feeds a spring. If it doesn’t say “spring water,” consumers ought to assume that what they are getting is reprocessed tap water.

But there are other problems with labeling. I give some great examples in the book: “Arctic Spring” water that comes from Florida; or “Yosemite” brand water that comes from Los Angeles; “Everest” water that comes from [Corpus Christi] Texas. And not only is there a lot of misleading information on bottled water labels, there is a lot of important information that ought to be on labels but isn’t:  the mineral content; where to get a water quality report; and where to complain about a problem.

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