The Story of Bottled Water (2010)

This is a story about a world obsessed with stuff.

It's a story about a system in crisis.

We're trashing the planet.

We're trashing each other.

And we're not even having fun.

The good thing is that

when we start to understand the system,

we start to see lots of places to step in

and turn these problems into solutions.

One of the problems with trying to use less stuff

is that sometimes we feel like we really need it.

What if you live in a city like, say, Cleveland

and you want a glass of water?

Are you going to take your chances and

get it from the city tap?

Or should you reach for a bottle of water

that comes from the pristine rainforests of… Fiji?

Well, Fiji brand water

thought the answer to this question was obvious.

So they built a whole ad campaign around it.

It turned out to be one of the dumbest moves

in advertising history.

You see, the city of Cleveland

didn’t like being the butt of Fiji’s jokes,

so they did some tests and guess what?

These tests showed

a glass of Fiji water is lower quality,

it loses taste tests against Cleveland tap

and costs thousands of times more.

This story is typical of what happens

when you test bottled water against tap water.

Is it cleaner?

Sometimes, sometimes not.

In many ways,

bottled water is less regulated than tap.

Is it tastier?

In taste tests across the country,

people consistently choose tap over bottled water.

These bottled water companies say

they're just meeting consumer demand.

But who would demand a less sustainable,

less tasty, way more expensive product, especially

one you can get for almost free in your kitchen?

Bottled water costs

about 2000 times more than tap water.

Can you imagine paying 2000 times

the price of anything else?

How about a $10,000 sandwich?

Yet people in the US buy

more than half a billion bottles of water every week.

That is enough to circle the globe more than 5 times.

How did this come to be?

Well, it all goes back to how our materials economy works

and one of its key drivers which is known as

manufactured demand.

If companies want to keep growing,

they have to keep selling more and more stuff.

In the 1970s giant soft drink companies got worried

as they saw their growth projections starting to level off.

There’s only so much soda a person can drink.

Plus it wouldn’t be long before people began realizing

that soda is not that healthy and turned back to

"gasp", drinking tap water.

Well, the companies

found their next big idea in a silly designer product

that most people laughed off as a passing yuppie fad.

"Water is free", people said back then,

"what will they sell us next, air?"

So how do you get people to buy this fringe product?

Simple. You manufacture demand.

How do you do that?

Well, imagine

you're in charge of a bottled water company.

Since people aren’t lining up to trade

their hard-earned money

for your unnecessary product,

you make them feel scared

and insecure if they don’t have it.

And that’s exactly what the bottled water industry did.

One of their first marketing tactics was

to scare people about tap water,

with ads like Fiji’s Cleveland campaign.

“When we’re done,” one top water executive said.

“tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.”

Next, you hide the reality of your product

behind images of pure fantasy.

Have you ever noticed

how bottled water tries to seduce us with

pictures of mountain streams and pristine nature?

But guess where a third of all bottled water in the US

actually comes from?

The tap!

Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coke’s Dasani are

two of the many brands

that are really filtered tap water.

But the pristine nature lie goes much deeper.

In a recent full page ad, Nestlé said:

“bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.”

What?!

They are trashing the environment

all along the product’s life cycle.

Exactly how is that environmentally responsible?

The problems start here

with extraction and production

where oil is used to make water bottles.

Each year,

making the plastic water bottles used in the US

takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars.

All that energy spent to make the bottle

even more to ship it around the planet

and then we drink it in about 2 minutes?

That brings us to the big problem

at the other end of the life cycle.

Disposal.

What happens to all these bottles when we’re done?

Eighty percent end up in landfills,

where they will sit for thousands of years,

or in incinerators, where they are burned,

releasing toxic pollution.

The rest gets collected for recycling.

I was curious about where

the plastic bottles that I put in the recycling bins go.

I found out that shiploads were being sent to India.

So, I went there.

I will never forget riding over a hill outside Madras

where I came face to face

with a mountain of plastic bottles from California.

Now, real recycling

would turn these bottles back into bottles.

But that wasn’t what was happening here.

Instead these bottles were slated to be downcycled,

which means turning them into lower quality products

that would just be chucked later.

The parts that couldn’t be downcycled

were thrown away there,

shipped all the way to India

just to be dumped in someone else’s backyard.

If bottled water companies

want to use mountains on their labels,

it would be more accurate to show

one of these mountains of plastic waste.

Scaring us, seducing us, and misleading us

these strategies are

all core parts of manufacturing demand.

Once they have manufactured all this demand,

creating a new multibillion dollar market,

they defend it by beating out the competition.

But in this case, the competition is

our basic human right to clean, safe drinking water.

Pepsi’s Vice Chairman publicly said

“The biggest enemy is tap water!”

They want us to think it’s dirty

and bottled water is the best alternative.

In many places, public water is polluted

thanks to polluting industries

like the plastic bottle industry.

And these bottled water guys are

all too happy to offer their expensive solutions,

which keep us hooked on their products.

It is time we took back the tap.

That starts with making a personal commitment

to not buy or drink bottled water

unless the water in your community is truly unhealthy.

Yes, it takes a bit of foresight

to grab a reusable bottle on the way out,

but I think we can handle it.

Then take the next step

join a campaign that’s working for real solutions,

like demanding investment in clean tap water for all.

In the US, tap water is underfunded by $24 billion

partly because people believe

drinking water only comes from a bottle!

Around the world,

a billion people don’t have access to clean water

right now.

Yet cities all over are spending millions of dollars

to deal with all the plastic bottles we throw out.

What if that money was spent

improving our water systems

or better yet, preventing pollution to begin with?

There are many more things we can do

to solve this problem.

Lobby your city officials

to bring back drinking fountains.

Work to ban the purchase of bottled water

by your school, your organization or entire city.

This is a huge opportunity for millions of people

to wake up and protect our wallets,

our health and the planet.

The good news is: it’s already started.

Bottled water sales have begun to drop while

business is booming for safe refillable water bottles.

Yay!

Restaurants are proudly serving “tap”

and people are choosing to pocket

the hundreds or thousands of dollars

they would otherwise be wasting on bottled water.

Carrying bottled water is on its way to being

as cool as smoking while pregnant.

We know better now.

The bottled water industry is getting worried

because the jig is up.

We are not buying into

their manufactured demand anymore.

We will choose our own demands, thank you very much,

and we’re demanding clean safe water for all.