Purity Myth Bags Millions for Bottlers

Americans are drinking a lot of bottled water: 8.3 billion gallons — about 26 gallons per person — in 2006. And they are spending a lot of money for this myth of purity packed in plastic. In 2005, consumers shelled out more than $8.8 billion for almost 7.2 billion gallons of non,sparkling bottled water. That was some $850 million more than they paid for 6.4 billion gallons in 2004.¹ Pepsi’s Aquafina brand, which is nothing more than tap water further purified, registered $425.7 million in sales in 2005, followed by Coca-Cola’s Dasani bottled tap water with a sales tally of $346.1 million. Meanwhile, Nestlé’s Poland Spring brand, which does come from spring sources, rang up sales of $199.7 million.¹ That all pencils out to bottled water costing consumers 240 to 10,000 times more per gallon than tap water that is as good, or better, and far more monitored.²

Swiss food and beverage giant Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo are profiting off the notion that bottled water is purer than tap water. Although the federal government attempted to deal with misleading labels in 1995, the practice of marketing bottled tap water with labels that give the impression it cascaded from a mountain spring continues. In fact, as much as 40 percent of bottled water is nothing more than the tap variety.² This industry “takes a free liquid that falls from the sky and sells it for as much as four times what we pay for gas,” Indiana University anthropology professor and bottled water expert Richard Wilk told the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2007. “There’s almost nowhere in America where the drinking water isnt adequate. Municipalities spend billions of dollars bringing clean, cheap water to people’s homes. But many of us would still rather buy it at a store.” ³ Indeed, Fortune magazine writer Marc Gunther paid $1.57 for a 20-ounce bottle of Aquafina, Pepsi‚ bottled tap water, and spent $3.05 for one gallon (128 ounces) of gas.⁴ A bit of math shows that his bottled water bill amounted to $10.05 per gallon: big profits for the bottlers. By comparison, most Americans pay about $2 per 1,000 gallons for municipal water service.⁵ According to the Natural Resources Defense Council‚ groundbreaking 1999 report, Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?, a $1.50 bottle of water generates a profit of about $0.50. Leaving out the cost of the water, this means that bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing, and other expenses account for the lion’s share of the company’s costs.2 One should note that those are internal — what the company bears. They do not include the external economic, social, and environmental costs that society must pay, such as loss of groundwater, toxic emissions from plastic production and destruction, air pollution from transporting the products, and the disposal of loads of empty bottles.

“This is an industry that takes a free liquid that falls from the sky and sells it for as much as four times what we pay for gas.” – Richard Wilk, University of Indiana

In many cases, consumers are spending all that extra money on those billions of gallons of bottled water because they have bought into the beverage industry’s marketing magic that water in a plastic bottle is safer and healthier than tap water. A 2003 Gallup survey commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the safety, testing, and regulation of U.S. drinking water and sewage systems, found that about 74 percent of the 1,000 survey respondents reported that they purchased and drank bottled water; 20 percent drank bottled water exclusively. When asked why they treated (includes boiling and filtering) their tap water or purchased bottled water, 33 percent of respondents cited health and safety concerns. The survey also found that people in their 30s and 40s, and those with higher education levels, were more likely than people in other age groups to drink bottled water than other segments of the population.⁶ In a separate poll, 86 percent of Americans expressed concern about their tap water. Forty-one percent of respondents reported using a water filter, bottled water, or both. About 56 percent of the bottled water drinkers cited safety and health as the primary reason they sought out alternatives to straight tap water.⁷ A third survey, this one a part of NRDC‚ report, found that 47 percent of the respondents said they drank bottled water because of what they saw as health and safety problems with tap water.²

^{Originally published at:  http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/report/take-back-the-tap/view-in-ful/#purity-myth-bags-millions}