Revolt: The Growing Campaign Against Bottled Water
I have no evidence to suggest it [the anti-bottled water campaign] has caused any decrease in sales. I think time will tell, but my sense of it is, it won’t.
—Joe Doss, President of the International Bottled
Water Association (August 2007)1
AS I DESCRIBED EARLIER, when I visited Google headquarters for a meeting in 2007, everyone was carrying around bottled water, offered free to all employees in coolers distributed in all the company’s buildings. When I returned in 2009, those bottles were gone. A vigorous debate by the employees themselves had led to the elimination of that perk, and the employees, still carrying their laptops from meeting to meeting, were now carrying refillable plastic, aluminum, and steel water bottles. The war on bottled water has begun and the cachet of bottled water is slowly being replaced with embarrassment and discomfort.
More and more, the media is reporting on the problems and concerns with bottled water. After a colleague and I produced an analysis of the energy implications of bottled water, my phone at the Pacific Institute started ringing off the hook with calls from reporters, TV and radio shows, activists, local community groups, and concerned citizens, all wanting to know what to do about bottled water. What are the real impacts of bottled water? How much do we really use? What happens to the plastic? Who is really controlling the industry? What are the energy and greenhouse gas implications of bottling and moving large volumes of water? How can a small town find information and resources to fight off multinational corporations that want to build new bottling plants tapping local water supplies? Some of the many headlines tell the story:
♦ “San Francisco bans municipal purchases of bottled water.”
♦ “Famous restaurateur Alice Waters bans commercial bottled water in her restaurant, Chez Panisse. Nestlé loses sales as Alice Waters bans bottled water.”
♦ “Canada: Time to Turn Back to the Tap?”
♦ “Local communities oppose new bottling plants in California, Michigan, Maine.”
♦ “New York City launches an ad campaign to support its own tap water. So does Paris.”
♦ “The Mayor of Salt Lake City opposes city purchases of bottled water.”
♦ “Corporate Accountability International launches a national anti-bottled water campaign.”
♦ “The International Bottled Water Association moves to a crisis footing.”
Some see ethical and moral reasons to fight bottled water. Some decry corporate control of such a precious and fundamentally public resource. Others reject bottled water for its economic and financial costs to the poor. Many are concerned about the environmental implications for the planet. Whatever the reason, a wide and growing range of individuals and groups—from cities, consumer groups, and environmental activists to restaurant owners, the religious community, and even politicians—have started to act to reduce and even eliminate their bottled water purchases and to influence others to do the same. At the same time, local communities are increasing efforts to challenge the production of bottled water. These efforts are squeezing the industry at two ends—putting pressure on demand and drying up supply. Will they make a difference? They already are. Sales are slowing, and in some places even falling, for the first time since the modern bottled water industry began.
In hindsight, there were hints that there might be limits to inexorable growth of bottled water markets. Sales of bottled water peaked in 2005 in France—the largest bottled water market in the world—and actually fell 2.5 percent the following year, at a time when sales were expanding rapidly elsewhere. According to Brandweek, an industry publication, by late 2007 bottled water sales were beginning to evaporate in other markets and regions as concern and public opposition started to grow. Early in 2008 the bottled water industry was still confident, at least in their official statements, that the growing opposition wouldn’t affect sales. In March, Nestlé, which was already seeing a slowing in the growth of sales, tried to attribute it to “cooler weather.”2 In April, the Canadian Bottled Water Association stated “we are not seeing a decline in sales” in response to some worrying projections.3 The IBWA in the United States remained outwardly assured through 2008 that sales would continue to grow. But there were hints things were changing. A Pepsi Co spokesman acknowledged in the fall of 2008 that “negative press” had limited the growth of sales of Aquafina to 6 percent in the third quarter—a substantial drop from previous multi-digit growth rates—but the company tried to assure investors that sales growth would continue.
This was wishful thinking. When numbers for 2008 were finally released, the industry realized its first overall decline since bottled water sales started to be reported decades earlier. The Beverage Marketing Corporation confirmed in spring 2009 that overall sales in the United States had turned negative. In 2009 Nestlé Waters acknowledged that bottled water sales fell 1.6 percent in 2008—the first time the company had seen a drop in overall sales. Another global beverage group, Canadean, described U.S. demand as “switched off” and is now forecasting annual growth of less than 1 percent for the next five years, a significant deterioration from the double-digit growth rates over the past decade.4 France’s Groupe Danone SA announced that its 2008 profits shrank 69 percent, in part because of declining sales of Evian bottled water in France, Spain, Japan, and the United Kingdom.5 In March 2009 the Independent reported that 2008 restaurant sales of bottled water in the United Kingdom dropped 9 percent compared with 2007 and that an increasing number of people request tap water when they eat out.6 Profit margins in the industry also fell because higher energy prices during the year led to an increase in both the cost of plastic and transportation—which accounts for a large part of the cost of producing bottled water. The drop in sales led Nestlé to announce that it would cut investment in its bottled water division to save money. CEO Paul Bulcke described 2009 as a year of “stabilization” for the bottled water division and they launched new marketing efforts to boost sales.7
The industry has tried to pin the drop in sales on the economy. Tom Lauria, vice president of Communications for the IBWA said in April 2009, “There’s plenty of evidence that this recession is taking its toll on all forms of consumer spending. But there’s little if any measurable evidence that activists have had an impact upon bottled water sales.”8 Conversely, anti-bottled water activists were quick to claim credit. “Across the country municipalities, universities, churches, restaurants and unions are kicking out the bottle and turning on the tap,” said Richard Girard, a spokesman for the Polaris Institute, a Canadian anti-bottled water group.9
And indeed, bottled water IS under attack. Cities are banning municipal purchases of bottled water and imposing taxes or other fees to recover costs associated with bottled water use. Local communities that are the sources of bottled water are fighting the impacts of existing bottling plants on local streams, groundwater wells, and ecosystems, as well as mobilizing to stop the construction of new plants. Environmental activists have plunged into the fight with national and even global initiatives, using arguments about science, information on the environmental impact of the bottled water industry, tools of guilt and moral suasion, and even browbeating.
Cities Fights Back
France is strongly associated in people’s minds with bottled water and the French are some of the largest consumers, drinking as much as 35 gallons per person per year (more than 100 liters per person per year)—much more than the average American. Famous French brands such as Perrier, Evian, Badoit, Volvic, Vittel, and others are shipped around the world and regularly found on the tables of Parisian cafés. But like New York, Paris is also proud of its municipal drinking water. For centuries Paris has been served by water from Roman aqueducts, the Canal de l’Ourcq, local rivers, and groundwater aquifers. These systems bring potable water throughout the city—to Paris’s famous Wallace fountains, for example.
It is thus no surprise that Paris has been on the front lines of the war between bottled water and tap water. After years of growing pressure from bottled water, in 2005 the city launched a campaign to promote city tap water. They asked famous designer Pierre Cardin to create a glass carafe to be distributed to individuals and Parisian cafés to hold tap water. The city water agency produced 30,000 of the carafes and distributed them for free. In a marketing effort, the carafes were designed to fit in the door of home refrigerators and were marked with the Eiffel Tower and the Eau de Paris logo. “People buy bottled water because of the marketing, and we realized that if we were to win them back to the tap we would have to do some marketing of our own,” said Franck Madureira of Eau de Paris.10
Some bottled water companies struck back, with new and aggressive advertising attacking Parisian tap water. “Je ne bois pas l’eau que j’utilise” (“I do not drink the water that I use”), declared a Parisian advertisement from Cristaline, a French mineral water, with an image of an open toilet with a red cross through it. Another Cristaline ad translates as “Nitrates, lead and chlorine…I don’t save money on water I drink.” The advertisements were published in defiance of a ruling from the national advertising standards agency, and so outraged Nelly Olin, the French environment minister, that she threatened legal actions: “I am angry. We do not accept that this company should cast aspersions on tap water. It is dishonest,” she said.11 In response to the ads, the President of Eau de Paris, the city water authority, arranged a blind water tasting at a café to show that consumers couldn’t distinguish between tap water and Cristaline.
Paris isn’t alone. New York City has always been proud of its water and it is one of only a handful of cities in the United States that wasn’t required by the EPA to filter its source water, because it is so pure. Like Parisians, New Yorkers have begun to promote their tap water. In 2006 advertising artist David Droga, chairman of an avant-garde ad agency in New York called Droga5, produced a pro bono magazine campaign encouraging readers to drink tap water. The “tapproject.org,” conducted in cooperation with UNICEF, produced articles and advertisements to encourage people to order tap water at participating restaurants, which then made a financial contribution to UN organizations working to provide safe water in developing countries.12 In 2007 the city also committed $700,000 to promotional ads for the “Get Your Fill” campaign supporting local tap water. As part of the campaign, the city posted 1,400 subway and bus kiosk advertisements and paid for radio spots touting the tap.
The municipal responses against bottled water have not just come as a result of the desire to defend and support local tap water. In towns and cities around the world, expanding government purchases of bottled water for employees or city events has also become a big expense, and one that is increasingly viewed as an unnecessary luxury in a time of financial hardship. As money has grown tighter, so have city budgets, prompting elected officials to begin to question discretionary expenditures for a wide range of things, including bottled water. This is leading more and more municipalities to cancel purchases of bottled water for employees and city-sponsored events.
One of the first major cities to try to restrict bottled water use was Los Angeles all the way back in 1987, when Mayor Thomas Bradley issued an order restricting the use of city funds for purchasing bottled water. That order was increasingly ignored during the 1990s and early 2000s, but efforts to cut municipal bottled water use picked up steam again in the mid-2000s, when Los Angeles more formally banned city agencies from using city funds to buy bottled water. This wasn’t a ban on bottled water in Los Angeles; rather Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was explicit that “City employees who choose to buy bottled water in their office units at their own expense are encouraged to continue to do so. However, bottled water should not be provided at the city’s expense.”13
In 2006 the town Council in Rochdale, England, saved £6,500 by cutting back on biscuits at their meetings. That prompted a discussion of eliminating mineral water purchases in favor of serving local tap water and saving another £35,000. The Tory leader of the Council, Ashley Dearnley, said, “There is nothing wrong with tap water and the reality is we cannot afford to keep buying mineral water.” In an unusual display of British bipartisanship, his Labour counterpart, Allen Brett, concurred, saying, “I think it is a good idea [to replace bottled water with tap water] and if Coun Dearnley hadn’t proposed it, then it may have been suggested in the budget proposals.”14
Also in 2006 Mayor Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City sent a letter to his administrative heads requesting that they voluntarily stop serving bottled water at meetings, and in public statements he called bottled water “the greatest marketing scam of all time.”15 Mayor Anderson broadened his anti-bottled water campaign when he met with his colleagues at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, an organization that represents mayors from over a thousand U.S. cities. At that meeting, Mayors Anderson, Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis sponsored a resolution underlining the importance of using municipal water and calling for studies on the environmental impacts of bottled water. The city of Seattle phased out bottled water sales for government offices in 2008, and Marty McOmber, spokesman for the mayor, summed up the issue when he said, “Seattle has one of the best municipal water supplies in the country. When you look at the cost of bottled water, both in terms of financial costs and costs on the environment, it’s a pretty clear choice.”16
The movement is spreading. Cities like San Francisco, Vancouver, St. Louis, Ann Arbor, Urbana, Santa Barbara, Manly, Toronto, Ottawa, Rome, Florence, Liverpool, and others, including larger and larger government entities, are moving to ban government purchases of bottled water and to endorse campaigns to promote local tap water. Toronto Mayor David Miller started requiring that tap water be made available at city council meetings and launched a campaign to “Fill with Toronto’s High Quality Tap Water.” In May 2009 San Mateo County, California, with a population of over 700,000 people, decided to stop buying bottled water with county funds. The county had been spending nearly $150,000 a year on bottled water, cups, and water coolers, and County Manager David Boesch asked the Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance prohibiting the use of county funds for this purpose. As an alternative, the county will put in water filters and buy cups and pitchers so that tap water can be used. In anticipation of a common complaint about the taste of tap water, the county sponsored a taste test. More than half of the people participating couldn’t tell the difference between Redwood City tap water and a local bottled water.17
As the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 has hit budgets, even states are starting to look at saving money by reducing bottle water purchases. The Connecticut General Assembly found that the state spends at least $500,000 annually on bottled water and dispensers. Massachusetts spends about $600,000. Minnesota spent nearly $166,000 on bottled drinking water and water cooler/dispenser rentals, not including expenditures by large state institutions like the University of Minnesota, which spends another $180,000 annually.18 All of these states are moving to cut these costs as they search for ways to save money. Bottled water now seems like a luxury, not a necessity.
Some local governments are using other tools to discourage use of bottled water or to recover the environmental costs associated with its use. Chicago has imposed a landmark tax of a nickel on each bottle of water sold in order to help defray the additional costs to the city of disposing of the plastic waste. The bottled water industry, including the IBWA, the American Beverage Association, and some Illinois merchant associations, promptly sued, fearing a tidal wave of new fees or taxes imposed on their product. In June 2009 the Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois ruled that Chicago’s tax was legal. One of the most important arguments made by the city, and upheld by the court, was that the environmental impacts of bottled water “can generally be avoided in Chicago by drinking tap water, which is a readily available, inexpensive, safe, and environmentally friendly alternative.”19
We are also seeing a modest revival of another approach to convince people to reduce purchases of bottled water—the restoration of the reputation and availability of the lowly water fountain. Modern water fountains are made without lead and they can both chill and filter the water. The Haws Corporation, founded in 1909 by a plumber from Berkeley, California, now sells a variety of models that include filters, coolers, variable stream heights, and more. Haws also offers a modern “hydration station” that can be used to fill portable water bottles. The Elkay Corporation in Illinois advertises fountains that include filters that remove viruses and cysts such as Cryptosporidium and Giardia, along with lead and chlorine. In a few airports, schools, parks, and other public spaces, new and highly visible state-of-the-art fountains are being installed. In January 2008 the Minneapolis City Council approved $500,000 for the construction of ten new public drinking fountains, each designed by a different Minnesota artist.20 Community groups in New York are calling for the city to improve the condition of park fountains. In the summer of 2008 the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, called for new water fountains to be put in parks and public spaces across the city, in part as an alternative to plastic bottled water. Said the mayor, “If this place is generally getting hotter and people are going off buying bottled water, I think we should have a new era of public fountains.”21 A recent study in German grade schools found that water fountains, combined with lesson plans about the benefits of drinking water, led to a drop in the number of overweight children, prompting calls for new school fountains.22 The city council of Toronto voted in December 2008 to ban the sale and provision of bottled water in city facilities and to invest in fixing old water fountains and installing new ones. The Manly Council in Australia recently installed six hightech water fountains on main streets and along the beach as part of a campaign against bottled water. In the fall of 2009 I received a phone call from a design firm working on the new terminal at San Francisco Airport, asking for information about global water issues to accompany the new “hydration stations” they were planning to put throughout the terminal. And the University of Central Florida’s stadium now has fifty new water fountains.
Local Water
An increasing number of restaurants have also been in the front lines of the campaign against bottled water, despite the fact that bottled water can be a significant source of revenue. Restaurants know that they can boost profits, and servers can boost tips, by making water another commodity. Yet more and more restaurateurs are shifting to encourage healthy foods and sustainable agriculture grown nearby—a campaign many call “local food.” Maybe it is time to launch a “local water” campaign as well to encourage consumers to turn away from bottled water and back toward local sources of supply.
In 2003 Larry Mindel opened Poggio, an upscale restaurant in Sausalito, California, across from San Francisco. From the beginning Mindel refused to push bottled water on his customers, instead serving filtered tap water and even sparkling tap water carbonated at the restaurant. He knows he could make more money if he and his servers pushed bottled water, but Mindel says it gives him a “stab” to charge for water. “Haven’t you gone to a restaurant and they just expect you to order two or three bottles of water and it’s $27 by the time you’re done?” While some restaurants fear the loss of revenues, the environmental advantages were more important to Mindel. Many of his customers seem to agree. “I love that,” said Joan Nitis. Her friend Anita Pira agreed, “We can buy more wine.”23
Incanto, also in the San Francisco Bay Area, switched to serving only tap water in reusable carafes in the mid-2000s. “Serving our local water in reusable carafes makes more sense for the environment than manufacturing thousands of single-use glass bottles for someone to use once and throw away,” says their website.24 They have good reason to serve local tap water: San Francisco’s water comes from a pristine watershed inside of Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada.
Perhaps the highest profile restaurateur to ban bottled water is famed foodie Alice Waters, whose world-renowned Chez Panisse in my hometown of Berkeley, California, stopped offering commercial still waters in 2006 and ended sales of sparkling water in 2007 when they installed their own carbonator. “All this energy to bottle water, carbonate it, put it in the glass, ship it and truck it to our restaurant—it was such a waste,” said Chez Panisse’s general manager, Mike Kossa-Rienzi. The restaurant now provides free filtered or carbonated tap water, a move that received a huge amount of press attention when it was announced, adding momentum to the anti-bottled water movement.25 Many more examples have been in the news. In New York City’s Del Posto restaurant, chef Mario Batali and co-owner Joseph Bastianich removed bottled water from the menu in 2007. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, chef Bret Jennings stopped serving bottled still water in his restaurant Elaine’s in 2008.26 These chefs and restaurant owners are unusual, not yet typical. But they are making high-profile public statements that have contributed to the perception that perhaps we can afford to rethink our bottled water purchases. The industry has responded—it decries the imposition of what it labels a “no choice policy”27—but the trend away from pushing bottled water in restaurants seems to be accelerating at the same time that local efforts to put limits on bottling plants are expanding.
Fighting Bottled Water at the Source
Serious opposition to bottled water has spread from the cities and towns where bottled water is consumed to the small communities where big and small bottlers produce it or where they want to build new factories to satisfy projected increases in demand. Local efforts to cash in on the bottled water phenomena have led to a growing number of confrontations as water resources that local residents have taken for granted have begun to disappear, streams have dried up, and groundwater levels have dropped when someone launches a local bottled water business. A number of these clashes have been chronicled in recent books and films, especially some of the major controversies around efforts by major companies like Nestlé in Michigan, California, Maine, and elsewhere.
One of the first blows against the bottling, export, and sale of local water came in the late 1990s in the small mountain community of Idyllwild in the San Jacinto Mountains, a couple of hours drive from the heart of Los Angeles. The town is small and peaceful, and the 3,500 inhabitants like it that way. The residents treasure their physical and mental distance from Los Angeles, and their biggest worry, besides the ever-present risk of forest fires, is the encroaching metropolis of Southern California. In the late 1990s a local resident, Chuck Stroud, began to notice that Lily Creek, a small stream he’d been visiting for many years, was drying up. And in mid-1998 he found out why. A local resident, Paul Black, had begun to pump groundwater from a well drilled on his land and to sell it as Idyllwild Mountain Spring Water. That groundwater had fed Lily Creek as well as aquatic habitat and trees that protected threatened desert species, which started to die off as water flows dropped. In the residential neighborhood around Black’s property, water tanker trucks started to interfere with traffic on the small local roads.
Expressing the view common to most private sellers of water, Paul Black told a reporter from the New York Times in 2003, ‘“I see a very effective use of the water. It’s safe, clean drinking water. Would you let it go, or would you do something with it?’”On the other side, Daniel Pietsch, an Idyllwild merchant who helped organize opposition to the bottled water operation said, “We’re here because we have a lot of dying trees, and we don’t like water going off our hill to be put in plastic bottles. We think it should be in our streams and our ground.”28
In Idyllwild, things got so out of hand that neighbors filed civil complaints and organized public demonstrations. Tempers flared and cars of protesters, including a pickup truck owned by Pietsch, were vandalized. Paul Black tried to run over a protestor with his white Mercedes SUV and was arrested on charges of assault with a deadly weapon. A court found him guilty of a single count of battery, sentenced him to serve sixty days on consecutive weekends at the Larry Smith Correctional Facility in Banning, and ordered him to participate in an anger-management program. In January 2004 he was also ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution for damage to Pietsch’s truck. Ultimately, environmental and land-use objections were effective with government agencies, and the waterworks was shut down.
The fight in Idyllwild will sound familiar to those who are fighting over bottled water today. Stroud’s initial discovery of the bottled water withdrawals and the community’s subsequent efforts to protect Lily Creek led to local activism, threats of violence, direct confrontations, and acts of vandalism.29 At the heart of these fights is a fundamental difference in philosophy between those who see a free-flowing river or a pristine groundwater aquifer as a wasted resource begging to be exploited, and those who value resources left in place to provide for natural systems and aesthetic benefits or to satisfy local community needs.
Concerns about bottled water have been growing especially rapidly in rural communities like Idyllwild, and Nestlé has been a high-profile target because of their strong demand for spring water, which must come from pristine, often rural, sources. In 2006 it was discovered that the Fujiaqua Company, a Nestlé affiliate in Japan, had been taking water for eight years from the Fujihakone Izu National Park without government permission.30 In Crystal Springs, Florida, a major Nestlé bottling subsidiary—Zephyrhills—drew public protests when the company tried to increase local spring water withdrawals sixfold. Environmentalists there are fighting to block bottlers’ operations and restrict the issuance of state permits in locales where companies can tap underground springs for minimal fees of a few hundred dollars a year. The state of Maine, where agencies have approved 15 bulk water exports and 18 bottled water facilities since 1987, has also seen more than its share of bottled water controversies.31 In Freyburg, Maine, one of the towns where Nestlé produces water for its Poland Spring brand, residents have claimed the company is depleting the aquifer and they are fighting against expansion plans. A local organization, H2O for ME, has challenged the state’s Department of Health and Human Services for failing to enforce a 1987 state law that prohibits bulk transportation of water away from the source. As part of this effort, residents are trying to get the state to impose a per-gallon fee on “nontraditional” users.
Nestlé also ran into a buzzsaw of opposition in Northern California for their proposal to build a massive new spring water plant in the town of McCloud, near Mount Shasta. Compared to Paul Black’s little bottling operation, the McCloud facility was a monster. As originally proposed, Nestlé planned to bottle a minimum of 500 million gallons of spring water each year from the McCloud River watershed, along with a potentially unlimited amount of groundwater from the same basin.32 The initial 100-year contract signed with the town called for Nestlé to build a one million square-foot water-bottling facility on the site of the former CalCedar lumber mill. This is at least double the size of the huge Arrowhead plant in Cabazon that I visited, and one report estimated that this single cavernous building could contain every existing building in the community.33 The amount of water Nestlé wanted to bottle is about equal to the entire production of Nestlé’s East Coast brand, Poland Spring.
Like most big industrial projects, this proposal had both supporters and opponents in the local community. Supporters saw benefits for the economically depressed town. Opponents worried that the proposed pumping would dry up local aquifers, deplete a major trout stream, and worsen truck traffic. Under the initial agreement, Nestlé would have paid the town of McCloud only $0.00008 for each gallon of water, or 8 cents per thousand gallons it took from McCloud’s springs.34 A retailer would sell that same gallon of spring water in separate plastic bottles for as much as $5 or more. Even if Nestlé only received one fifth of the retail cost—a typical industry claim—the McCloud plant would have brought them over $500 million dollars a year. Big business indeed. Local opposition led Nestlé in August 2008 to announce they would renegotiate their contract and that they would reduce the size of the facility and annual water consumption. The opposition to the plant continued, however, and in September 2009, after six years of controversy, Nestlé withdrew its plans for a plant in McCloud.
In 2009 another proposal by Nestlé to draw 65 million gallons a year of spring water from along the Arkansas River in Colorado also ran into local opposition. The spring would be Nestlé’s first in Colorado. Water would be pumped from groundwater wells by the river and trucked out of the basin to an Arrowhead bottling plant in Denver. At present Nestlé cannot satisfy the demand for their Arrowhead Spring water in Colorado without trucking water from other plants as far away as California. Press reports suggest that Nestlé has plans to tap springs in several other locations in Colorado as well. While a company spokesman said, “It’s such a small—what I’ll call a surgical—extraction of spring water from this aquifer,” the permit asks for permission to withdraw 10 percent of the flow from these springs.35
Banning the Bottle: The Beginning of a Civil Movement
As the scope and intensity of the opposition to bottled water has expanded, so has the sophistication of the campaigns. One of the most organized efforts to move people away from the bottle is coming from the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International (CAI). CAI began in 1977 as Infact with a mission to wage “campaigns that challenge irresponsible and dangerous actions by corporate giants.” Among their early campaigns were calls for reforms in the marketing of infant formula in poor countries and increased restrictions on international sales of tobacco.
For the past few years CAI has been running a campaign called “Think Outside the Bottle” to combat “aggressive attempts to turn water from a basic human right into an unaffordable luxury.” They run an active media campaign, conduct highly public taste tests in big cities, and work with mayors and city managers to try to reduce or ban purchases of bottled water by public agencies. “Bottled water is bad for taxpayers, bad for public water systems, and bad for the environment,” says Deborah Lapidus, a national organizer with CAI.36 In Canada, a comparable effort called the “Back to the Tap” movement has been launched by university campuses, church groups, municipalities, and advocacy groups. In the United Kingdom, Friends of the Earth and the Food Commission, an independent watchdog on food issues, has called bottled water “environmental madness” and pushed for the public to stop buying it.37
Colleges and universities are also getting involved in anti-bottled water efforts. Students at Leeds University in England voted in 2008 to ban bottled water in bars, cafés, and shops on their campus—a decision that was heavily covered by the British press.38 “Bottled water companies must fear that the days of fooling people into paying handsomely for a product they could get for free are numbered,” said Sophie Haydock in a commentary in the Guardian.39 Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, banned the sale of bottled water on campus, and other U.S. schools, including Brandeis University, Penn State, and Ohio Wesleyan University, have begun moving toward similar bans. In Canada, the University of Winnipeg and Memorial University in Newfoundland have eliminated the sale of bottled water on their campuses, and in February 2009 students at McGill University voted to end the sale and distribution of bottled water within the Student Union building and to lobby the University administration to eliminate the sale and distribution of all bottled water on the campus.40
Bottled Water Companies Fight Back
The bottled water industry is fighting back. As anti-bottled water efforts accelerate and threaten sales and profits, the industry has begun to respond with a growing public relations push, increased spending on advertising, new lobbying efforts to stop legislation they don’t like, and a general battening down of the PR hatches. The most coordinated effort to defend bottled water is coming from the International Bottled Water Association. The IBWA has dramatically ramped up its response to criticisms of bottled water. In 2006 IBWA wrote 14 letters to the editor or editorial comments and responded to 105 media interviews. In just the first nine months of 2007 they wrote 34 letters to the editor and responded to over 160 media interview requests.41 In August 2007 the IBWA took out full-page ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times responding to attacks on the industry. In 2008 they launched attacks on environmental groups, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and publications critical of bottled water (as no doubt they will on this book as well). In 2009 they began releasing YouTube videos promoting bottled water safety and profiling small family-owned bottlers, and they filed lawsuits against what they see as bad laws or unfair business practices. The IBWA has also directly accused Corporate Accountability International of confusing customers and misleading the public, saying, “The CAI campaign is based on factual errors and subjective viewpoints on bottled water and does nothing more than confuse and misinform consumers.”42
Other industry efforts are underway as well. In Great Britain, bottlers (including Nestlé, Danone, and Highland Spring) created a lobby group call the Natural Hydration Council to respond to opposition to bottled water. Jeremy Clarke, the director of the council, says the companies want to bring “hard facts” and “real science” to the debate. “Bottled water is the healthiest and greenest drink on the shelves,” he said.43 Some companies have stopped responding to media requests altogether, perhaps in the hopes that anti-bottled water campaigns will just dry up and blow away. When a reporter pursuing a bottled water story called Fiji Water in California in August 2007, he was told by a company representative, “We don’t like talking to the media, whether it’s positive, negative, or indifferent.”44
The industry is also beginning to challenge municipal government efforts to promote local tap water, and one of the key battlegrounds is Florida, which ranks third behind Texas and California in bottled water purchases, consuming more than 575 million gallons a year. When Miami-Dade County, Florida, ran a series of radio advertisements between August and October 2008 touting the county’s tap water as cheaper, safer, and purer than bottled water, the bottled water industry threatened to sue. Over a five-week period the county bought over 1,600 spots on 12 FM radio stations. The ads featured a talking water faucet: “You think bottled water is purer and safer? You think it’s better? Well, you’re wrong. It’s just the opposite…” Although no specific bottled water brands were mentioned, Nestlé Waters North America, which operates several plants in Zephyrhills and Madison County and can draw nearly a billion gallons a year from four springs for sale throughout the southeastern United States, was particularly incensed. “It’s an attack on the integrity of the company,” said a Nestlé spokesman, “It’s an attack on the product we produce.”45 A law firm representing Nestlé sent a letter to the county demanding they pull the ads, and the company also sent a complaint to the Florida attorney general. The Miami Herald newspaper reported that the International Bottled Water Association threatened “similar action,” though the issue seems to have been dropped when the ads ended.
The bottled water industry has also launched their own new campaigns to promote and encourage bottled water use and to shoot down any efforts to restrict their operations. In New Mexico in 2007, a state senate bill to exempt bottled water from the state’s gross receipts tax was approved after intense lobbying by bottlers. The state had earlier lifted the tax from most groceries and food staples but left it in place for things like coffee sold in cafés and for bottled water.46 At the same time, bottlers continue to oppose efforts to add bottled water to bottle recycling bills, which were often put in place long before there was a substantial bottled water presence on grocery shelves or in our landfills. In 2009 Nestlé Waters North America sued New York State to block efforts to expand that state’s bottle bill to include bottled water. Among other things, the measure expanded five-cent deposits from just carbonated beverages, wine coolers, and beer, to include bottled water.47
Bottlers have reason to be worried. The sales drop in 2008—the first ever reported—seems to represent a clear change in public perceptions about bottled water. While the bottled water companies, in public, believe that the drop can be attributed to the economic downturn, in private they must fear that the anti-bottled water campaigns are having an effect. Certainly, the environmental problems with bottled water, the economic costs to pocketbooks, and the growing support for improving tap water quality and reliability are all contributing to new thinking about the simple act of buying a plastic bottle of water. Bottled water is not likely to disappear, nor necessarily should it. But it is going to be increasingly difficult for the industry to argue that bottled water is just another benign commercial product, like soda, or soap, or blue jeans. There are going to have to be fundamental changes in the rules for licensing, bottling, and selling water; new more “ethical” or “green” alternatives, and far stronger government regulation and oversight to protect the public interest and health. The bottled water revolt is here, it is real, and it is not going away.