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This is a story about a world obsessed with stuff.

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It's a story about a system in crisis.

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We're trashing the planet.

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We're trashing each other.

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And we're not even having fun.

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The good thing is that

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when we start to understand the system,

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we start to see lots of places to step in

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and turn these problems into solutions.

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One of the problems with trying to use less stuff

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is that sometimes we feel like we really need it.

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

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and you want a glass of water?

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Are you going to take your chances and

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get it from the city tap?

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Or should you reach for a bottle of water

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that comes from the pristine rainforests of… Fiji?

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Well, Fiji brand water

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thought the answer to this question was obvious.

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So they built a whole ad campaign around it.

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It turned out to be one of the dumbest moves

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in advertising history.

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You see, the city of Cleveland

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

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so they did some tests and guess what?

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These tests showed

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a glass of Fiji water is lower quality,

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it loses taste tests against Cleveland tap

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and costs thousands of times more.

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This story is typical of what happens

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when you test bottled water against tap water.

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Is it cleaner?

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Sometimes, sometimes not.

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In many ways,

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bottled water is less regulated than tap.

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Is it tastier?

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In taste tests across the country,

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people consistently choose tap over bottled water.

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These bottled water companies say

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they're just meeting consumer demand.

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But who would demand a less sustainable,

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less tasty, way more expensive product, especially

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one you can get for almost free in your kitchen?

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Bottled water costs

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about 2000 times more than tap water.

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Can you imagine paying 2000 times

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the price of anything else?

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How about a $10,000 sandwich?

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Yet people in the US buy

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more than half a billion bottles of water every week.

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

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How did this come to be?

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

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and one of its key drivers which is known as

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manufactured demand.

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If companies want to keep growing,

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they have to keep selling more and more stuff.

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In the 1970s giant soft drink companies got worried

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as they saw their growth projections starting to level off.

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

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Plus it wouldn’t be long before people began realizing

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that soda is not that healthy and turned back to

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"gasp", drinking tap water.

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Well, the companies

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found their next big idea in a silly designer product

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that most people laughed off as a passing yuppie fad.

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"Water is free", people said back then,

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"what will they sell us next, air?"

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

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Simple. You manufacture demand.

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How do you do that?

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Well, imagine

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you're in charge of a bottled water company.

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Since people aren’t lining up to trade

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their hard-earned money

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for your unnecessary product,

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you make them feel scared

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and insecure if they don’t have it.

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

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One of their first marketing tactics was

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to scare people about tap water,

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with ads like Fiji’s Cleveland campaign.

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

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

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Next, you hide the reality of your product

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behind images of pure fantasy.

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Have you ever noticed

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how bottled water tries to seduce us with

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pictures of mountain streams and pristine nature?

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

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actually comes from?

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The tap!

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Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coke’s Dasani are

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two of the many brands

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that are really filtered tap water.

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But the pristine nature lie goes much deeper.

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In a recent full page ad, Nestlé said:

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

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What?!

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They are trashing the environment

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all along the product’s life cycle.

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Exactly how is that environmentally responsible?

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The problems start here

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with extraction and production

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where oil is used to make water bottles.

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Each year,

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making the plastic water bottles used in the US

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takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars.

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All that energy spent to make the bottle

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even more to ship it around the planet

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and then we drink it in about 2 minutes?

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That brings us to the big problem

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at the other end of the life cycle.

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Disposal.

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

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Eighty percent end up in landfills,

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where they will sit for thousands of years,

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or in incinerators, where they are burned,

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releasing toxic pollution.

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The rest gets collected for recycling.

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I was curious about where

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

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I found out that shiploads were being sent to India.

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So, I went there.

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I will never forget riding over a hill outside Madras

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where I came face to face

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with a mountain of plastic bottles from California.

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Now, real recycling

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would turn these bottles back into bottles.

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But that wasn’t what was happening here.

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Instead these bottles were slated to be downcycled,

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which means turning them into lower quality products

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that would just be chucked later.

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The parts that couldn’t be downcycled

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were thrown away there,

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shipped all the way to India

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just to be dumped in someone else’s backyard.

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If bottled water companies

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want to use mountains on their labels,

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it would be more accurate to show

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one of these mountains of plastic waste.

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Scaring us, seducing us, and misleading us

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these strategies are

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all core parts of manufacturing demand.

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Once they have manufactured all this demand,

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creating a new multibillion dollar market,

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they defend it by beating out the competition.

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But in this case, the competition is

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our basic human right to clean, safe drinking water.

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Pepsi’s Vice Chairman publicly said

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“The biggest enemy is tap water!”

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They want us to think it’s dirty

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and bottled water is the best alternative.

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In many places, public water is polluted

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thanks to polluting industries

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like the plastic bottle industry.

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And these bottled water guys are

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all too happy to offer their expensive solutions,

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which keep us hooked on their products.

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It is time we took back the tap.

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That starts with making a personal commitment

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to not buy or drink bottled water

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unless the water in your community is truly unhealthy.

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Yes, it takes a bit of foresight

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to grab a reusable bottle on the way out,

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but I think we can handle it.

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Then take the next step

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join a campaign that’s working for real solutions,

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like demanding investment in clean tap water for all.

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

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partly because people believe

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drinking water only comes from a bottle!

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Around the world,

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a billion people don’t have access to clean water

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right now.

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Yet cities all over are spending millions of dollars

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to deal with all the plastic bottles we throw out.

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What if that money was spent

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improving our water systems

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or better yet, preventing pollution to begin with?

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There are many more things we can do

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to solve this problem.

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Lobby your city officials

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to bring back drinking fountains.

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Work to ban the purchase of bottled water

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by your school, your organization or entire city.

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This is a huge opportunity for millions of people

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to wake up and protect our wallets,

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our health and the planet.

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The good news is: it’s already started.

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Bottled water sales have begun to drop while

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business is booming for safe refillable water bottles.

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Yay!

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Restaurants are proudly serving “tap”

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and people are choosing to pocket

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the hundreds or thousands of dollars

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they would otherwise be wasting on bottled water.

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Carrying bottled water is on its way to being

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as cool as smoking while pregnant.

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We know better now.

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The bottled water industry is getting worried

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because the jig is up.

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We are not buying into

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their manufactured demand anymore.

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

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and we’re demanding clean safe water for all.