MR. MCGUIRE, to BENJAMIN: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word…. Are you listening? … Plastics.”
—The Graduate, 1967
Manufacturing plastic water bottles consumes water and energy. So does pumping water from underground, filling the plastic bottles with water, and transporting them by truck, rail, airplane, or container ship. Sometimes water and energy are used to recycle or dispose of the bottles. Bottled water is a cultural phenomenon and one of the most popular beverages in the world, but it has also been criticized as a prime example of the misuse of resources.
In 2001, Americans drank over 5 million gallons of bottled water and spent over $6 billion to do so, according to the International Bottled Water Association. In 2007, we consumed over 8.7 million gallons of bottled water, worth $11.5 billion. And though consumption has slipped a bit, due to the global recession and changing tastes, Americans still spent $10.6 billion to drink 8.4 million gallons of bottled water in 2009.
These are phenomenal statistics for any product, but especially for one that is readily available from fountains and nearly free at home. Drinking eight glasses of water a day (recommended for health) costs 49 cents a year, if taken from a New York City tap. The same amount of water costs twenty-nine hundred times more—about $1,400 a year—if it is commercial bottled water, and bottled water adds greenhouse gases and landfill waste. But bottled water’s perceived convenience and healthfulness led Americans to drink about 29 gallons of bottled water per capita per year in 2007. While soft drinks remain the most popular beverage overall, bottled water is the fastest-growing beverage category in the world.
The number of independent brands that have appeared in the United States in recent years is mind-boggling. They include, among others, Tibet 5100, water from Tibetan glaciers; Jana Skinny Water, from Croatia, a “no-calorie water … to help people lose and maintain their weight”; K9 Water for dogs, including Toilet Water (chicken-flavored), Gutter Water (beef), and Puddle Water (liver); Liquid OM, said to contain vibrations from a giant gong that promote a positive outlook; Holy Spring Water, said to be blessed by a rabbi, a priest, a monk, and a shaman; 018 Fruit Water, “extracted from Australian fruit”; Aquamantra waters, in flavors called I Am Lucky, I Am Healthy, and I Am Loved; Spiritual Water, a purified municipal water sold in bottles with ten different Christian labels, such as the Virgin Mary and the Hail Mary; and Tap’d NY, purified water from the New York City tap that sells for $1.50 per bottle and has a label promising, “No glaciers were harmed in making this water.”
Among the strangest bottled waters available is MaHaLo Deep Sea water, taken from three thousand feet beneath the Pacific off the island of Kona, Hawaii. There, Koyo USA, a Japanese company, pumps seawater, desalinates it, and sells it for $5.50 a bottle. Koyo claims that its MaHaLo Deep Sea water is the purest, most nutritious beverage on earth, one that is “older than Jesus.” Competitors have sprung up, and bottled water has now become Hawaii’s fastest-growing export.
Then there is Bling H2O, which comes in a corked limited-edition frosted bottle embedded with Swarovski crystals. “Either you bling or you don’t bling,” said the company’s ebullient founder, Kevin Boyd, a Hollywood producer. In 2007, Boyd sold 750-milliliter bottles of his water (from springs in Tennessee) at his Bling store in Los Angeles for $40. The same bottle at the Tao nightclub in Las Vegas was selling for $90. “This is pop culture in a bottle!” said Boyd.
In spite of this seemingly infinite variety of boutique waters, the real bottled water business in America—the $10.6-billion-a-year phenomenon—is far more prosaic. It is a consolidated industry dominated by four multinational corporations with names familiar from the supermarket: Pepsi, Coke, Nestlé, and Danone.
Pepsi’s Aquafina leads the market, with 13 percent, and Coca-Cola’s Dasani controls 11 percent. Evian is owned by Danone, the French food company known for its yogurt, and is distributed in America by Coca-Cola. But the biggest player in the United States is Nestlé Waters of North America (NWNA), which built a collection of springwater brands across the country that together controlled 38 percent of the US market in 2010, more than Cocoa-Cola and Pepsi combined.
Aquafina and Dasani are classified by the FDA as “purified water,” which is code for tap water that has been filtered. In 2007, Nestlé introduced Nestlé Pure Life, which is also a purified water. Approximately 44 percent of all bottled water is purified water; 56 percent comes from springs or groundwater. In other words, nearly half the bottled water consumed by Americans is tap water that has conveniently been packaged in plastic.
Bottles of lightweight polyethylene terephthalate, or PET plastic, are automatically “blown” by machines from resins made from fossil fuels, usually petroleum and natural gas. In 2006, Beverage Marketing Corporation reported, Americans bought 31.2 billion liters of water, requiring some nine hundred thousand tons of plastic to bottle. Another study showed that 50 billion plastic water bottles were used in the United States that year, or 167 bottles for every citizen. To make a typical one-liter plastic bottle, cap, and packaging, according to the European plastics industry, requires about 3.4 megajoules of energy. In 2006, it took 106 billion megajoules of energy to make enough bottles to contain the 31.2 billion liters of water Americans drank.
In a widely cited editorial in 2007, “In Praise of Tap Water,” the New York Times reported that it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the water bottles Americans used. But that number was incorrect, it turned out, the result of a misunderstanding between a journalist and a researcher. After conducting a thorough study, Peter Gleick’s Pacific Institute found that it took far more oil—about 17 million barrels of oil equivalent—to produce the plastic water bottles used by Americans in 2006. That, the institute reported, was the equivalent of enough energy to fuel more than 1 million American cars and light trucks for a year. By contrast, the energy required for local tap water is typically about 0.005 megajoules per liter, or around a thousandth as much. A further benefit of tap water is that it does not produce tons of plastic litter or require enormous transportation costs.
Indeed, every ton of PET manufactured results in about three tons of carbon dioxide. The production of plastic bottles for water in 2006 resulted in more than 2.5 million tons of CO2, a greenhouse gas.
Filling the bottles of water at bottling plants, transporting it by flatbed truck, rail, freighter, or cargo plane, used more energy. So did chilling it in store coolers and home refrigerators. The Pacific Institute concluded that the total amount of energy used for a bottle of water could be represented by filling a plastic water bottle a quarter full of oil. Because producing energy requires water, the institute concluded, every liter of bottled water sold required three to four liters of water to produce.
PET is recyclable, but the great majority of water bottles—about 38 billion a year, worth over $1 billion in 2008, by one estimation—end up in landfills. This is a terrible waste, but it is not an easy problem to fix.
In the United States, many different grades of plastic are used for beverage bottles, but in spite of well-meaning education programs, the public has yet to embrace recycling in a serious way. No national network of recycling plants that will accept a wide range of plastics exists; financial incentives for consumers to recycle are poor; and there are no national guidelines for recycling. The problem requires federal leadership to solve.
It took Western European nations years to work out recycling strategies, but many countries there now have relatively effective systems in place. In France, Italy, and Germany, governments and industry have partnered to educate the public: large multicolored containers at supermarkets or in town centers accept a wide range of products to be recycled by a network of advanced recycling plants, and compared to the five-cents-a-bottle return fee paid by a few states in America, financial incentives to recycle are much higher in Europe.
“If they can do it there, why can’t we do the same here?” American activists have demanded.
US beverage companies have responded with recycling initiatives, by purchasing carbon credits, and by developing thinner bottles that use less plastic. Although biodegradable, corn-based plastic bottles exist, their shelf life is limited, and they tend to go sot in the sun. For better and for worse, PET lasts almost infinitely.
After growing at a rapid clip, about 5 to 15 percent a year, bottled-water sales in the United States declined for the first time in thirty years in 2008. But not by much, only about 1 percent, a barely perceptible drop. In 2009, bottled-water revenues declined another 5 percent and volume dipped 2.5 percent.
Bottled water now faces a backlash against its economic and environmental costs. Some consider it a luxury, while others object to the amount of water the bottlers take from aquifers, the energy used to transport heavy water from Fiji or the Alps to America, the plastic used in bottles, and the carbon footprint of the product.
Beneath the dark green fir trees, wide ocher fields, and rolling purple-blue mountains of western Maine lie deep aquifers filled with billions of gallons of pristine water. The state gets an average of 24 trillion gallons of rain a year; about 50 percent of that runs off into rivers and lakes, 30 percent evaporates, and 20 percent—or 2 to 5 trillion gallons—filters through bedrock or glacial sand and gravel deposits and collects underground. The Maine Geological Survey has mapped over thirteen hundred square miles of aquifers, which are annually recharged by 240 billion gallons of precipitation. Maine’s water is consistently ranked at, or near, the highest quality in the nation.
Since Hiram Ricker built a spa here in the mid-nineteenth century, the Poland Spring Water Company has advertised its wares as “the best tasting water on Earth … since 1845.” Poland Spring bottled water is undeniably refreshing. To my palate, it doesn’t taste particularly good or bad; it tastes like what it is: purified springwater. It lacks that distinctive minerally flavor water aficionados prize. But the water Poland Spring sells is clearly what most Americans want: it is the bestselling springwater in the nation, and the third-bestselling water brand overall, behind Aquafina and Dasani. Poland Spring is the largest bottler in Maine and uses about 700 million gallons of water annually—enough to cover the Mall in Washington, DC, to a depth of six feet.
About thirty miles away from Poland Spring, in the town of Hollis, sits an enormous industrial building in what used to be a potato field. Inside the gleaming half-million-square-foot highly automated factory, seven bottling lines produce some 900 million PET bottles a year and fill them with water directly from a spring. The water has been filtered, treated with ultraviolet light, and inspected, remaining untouched by human hands. This is the largest water-bottling plant in North America. It produces 65 million cases a year. At the rear of the building are double-stacked pallets, loaded with 24 million bottles—2.5-gallon jugs, half-liter and half-pint bottles, and eleven-ounce “Aquapods” for kids—spread over six acres and extending eight feet high. This virtual sea percolated through the aquifer beneath the plant only a few days earlier and will soon be trucked throughout the Northeast and replaced by the next plastic-encased virtual sea. The plant processes water twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.
Poland Spring’s advertising slogan is “What it means to be from Maine.” But as the dimensions of the Hollis facility indicate, the company is no longer a homespun, family-run operation. In 1980, Poland Spring was bankrupt when Perrier purchased it; a dozen years later, Perrier and Poland Spring were taken over by Nestlé, the largest food-products company in the world, based in Switzerland. Some Mainers welcomed the multinational for the jobs it brought; others resented it as a greedy corporate interloper.
“As oil is to Saudi Arabia, water is to Maine. And Nestlé wants to control it,” said James Wilfong, a resident of Stow, near Poland Spring.
In December 2004, H2O for ME, a citizens’ group led by Wilfong, questioned why Poland Spring has the right to take state water without having to bid for it or pay much for it. “We spent twenty-five years, and millions of dollars, cleaning up the groundwater in this state,” said Wilfong. “I was part of that effort when I served in the legislature in the seventies. We made sure every single underground gas tank in the state was dug up, and polluted ground near aquifers was remediated. That took a lot of work, let me tell you. And after all that, to say we citizens don’t have an interest in our own water? I don’t think so.”
In 2004, H2O for ME launched an initiative to impose a first-in-the-nation 19.3-cents-per-gallon tax on the water that Poland Spring pumped. Based on the Alaska Permanent Fund, which puts oil-extraction fees into a public trust, a portion of Maine’s water fees would be used to enhance the state’s environmental protections, while a larger percentage would be invested in small businesses, to grow the state economy. The idea had nationwide—perhaps worldwide—implications. Over the winter of 2004, Wilfong and an army of volunteers worked to get the 50,700 signatures required to put the issue on the ballot. Momentum built slowly. Wilfong’s allies complained bitterly about Nestlé’s fleet of fifty to one hundred silver tanker trucks that rumble through town at all hours, and the resulting road wear and traffic accidents. Others griped about Maine’s water being siphoned off by “foreigners” who enjoyed large tax breaks; still others muttered darkly of alleged bribery, quiet secret land deals, and influence peddling—claiming that “the long tentacles” of Nestlé had co-opted the state. (I have seen no evidence to support these claims.)
Meanwhile, Kim Jeffery, CEO of Nestlé Waters North America (based in Greenwich, Connecticut, incorporated in Delaware), unleashed a PR offensive. Flying to Portland, Jeffery hired Maine’s leading law firm and the former state geologist as consultants—or, as Wilfong charged, “to take them off the table, so we couldn’t use them.” Jeffery argued that with all the rain that Maine gets, Nestlé’s withdrawals were too small to have any negative impact on aquifers, and, besides, they were renewable. He stressed that Poland Spring plants were “clean, modern, and environmentally responsible” operations that provide well-paid jobs and give generously to their neighbors. He said that H2O for ME and other groups were a “threat to jobs” and that their proposed “$100 million tax” would exceed Poland Spring’s annual profit and could very well “drive us out of Maine.”
Wilfong stiffened his resolve. “Nestlé is very sophisticated,” he told me. “They say, ‘What’s good for Nestlé is good for Maine.’ They’ve been tossing money at the big environmental organizations, who have remained curiously silent on the water issue. They give money to local schools and volunteer fire departments. You need books at the library? A new sign on the road? How about a cross-country ski trail? Nestlé is happy to help. This is how they have worked their way into local water districts. They do the same thing all across the country. How can local people fight against that?”
The dispute over Poland Spring exposed social fissures in Maine, pitting blue-collar workers against the increasing numbers of retirees, environmentalists, and white-collar baby boomers moving to the state. The commissioner of the state Department of Conservation said that Maine has “an endless supply of water.” Governor John Baldacci equated Poland Spring to L.L. Bean as a promoter of Maine as a symbol of quality to the nation.
In early 2005, Wilfong’s petition drive failed. In 2007, he and his allies proposed a new system that would give the state greater control in monitoring and controlling its water and would require water companies to bid against one another for the right to sink new wells, with proceeds going to the state. Poland Spring and Governor Baldacci pushed back hard against the plan. But the debate led to a discussion in the state legislature, which resulted in greater transparency about water-bottling operations, and enhanced data collection about the impacts of the growing business on aquifers and wells.
The question of who owns groundwater has only recently been debated in the eastern United States, which doesn’t have the West’s long history of water wars. “We have the ‘absolute dominion’ rule here, which, like in Texas, means that even though surface water is protected, you can pump all the groundwater you want, regardless of the impact on your neighbors,” Wilfong explained. “It’s an ancient relic from the age of hand pumps, and most states have abolished it. We should go to ‘reasonable use’ laws for water, like in New Hampshire and Vermont. But so far we haven’t. The state legislature has disregarded its own studies and refused to put our water in a public trust.”
New Hampshire and Vermont have tightened restrictions on large-scale water withdrawals, while anti-bottled-water groups in Michigan and California have proposed similar bills for those states.
In 2005, Nestlé submitted an application to build a Poland Spring trucking facility in Fryeburg, Maine, near Wilfong’s home. If approved, fifty tanker trucks would fill up there every twenty-four hours and drive along Route 302, a narrow, undulating country road where the tarmac is in poor condition. Alarmed by this perceived incursion, a group of Frye-burg citizens hired an attorney and filed an appeal. In 2006, the town’s zoning board denied Nestlé’s permit. The company responded by filing a countersuit against the citizens of Fryeburg and the protest group; not content with that, Nestlé then filed suit in state supreme court. The two sides traded legal broadsides through 2007 and 2008, during which Nestlé was denied a permit to build a Fryeburg pumping facility three times. Finally, in March 2009, the Maine supreme court ruled in favor of Poland Spring and cleared the way for a Fryeburg pumping station. “One town after another is falling to Nestlé,” lamented Wilfong.
By 2010, Poland Spring owned 5,500 acres of land and operated twenty wells in Maine. A third bottling plant, near Kingfield, had opened, and the company’s water hunters were on the lookout for new sources. “Things have quieted down,” said NWNA’s Kim Jeffery. “We’ve invested millions into Maine, pay our taxes, and are totally transparent with communities.”
Jim Wilfong predicted that the state supreme court had launched Maine down a slippery slope. “I see this huge demand for water growing worldwide,” he said. “Pretty soon it’s not going to be just companies like Nestlé that take our water away in little bottles. It’s going to be railroad-tanker-trains-ful. It’s going to be pipelines. Shiploads. Let’s face it, the world needs water, and Maine’s got it. I don’t know when this will happen, but I know it will. And we citizens, apparently, cannot control it.”
Bottled water can cost between 240 and 10,000 times as much as tap water, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found. Bottled water even costs more per gallon than gasoline, as Gustave Leven, the former chairman of Perrier, noted with satisfaction: “It struck me that all you had to do was take the water out of the ground and sell it for more than the price of wine, milk—or, for that matter, oil.”
A 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund discovered that a $2.50 bottle of water shipped from a “pure European aquifer” is no healthier or tastier than water from a city faucet. While providers of public water, which are overseen by the EPA, are required to post the bacteriological and chemical content of their water, producers of bottled water—which is considered a “food product” and is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration—are not required to list such information on their labels. Many bottled waters have labels, but they list things such as “Zero grams of fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, dietary fiber, sugars, protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron.” This is not only meaningless and unhelpful, it’s confusing to the consumer.
In France or Italy, water is prized for what minerals are in it; in the United States, we prize water for what is not in it. All waters (except distilled water, which is not healthful to drink) contain some minerals, such as naturally occurring salts. Minerals give water its distinctive flavor. In Europe, each brand of “mineral water” proudly proclaims a specific taste, mineral content, laxative power, level of calcium (which helps strengthen bones), and so on. The FDA allows bottlers to say that an American springwater has “0 sodium,” which is not accurate. In an effort to feed their children the “purest” food available, some parents mix bottled water with infant formula, unaware that the high mineral content of certain bottled waters makes them unsuitable for infants, or the elderly.
The FDA also does not require bottlers to explain where the water comes from, how the water was purified, the results of water-quality testing, or where such information might be found. There is virtually no oversight of the design of water labels, which usually feature a misty grotto, a snowy peak, or a dense rain forest—images that conjure up pristine aquifers far removed from polluting civilization—when in fact the water is taken from municipal supplies, e.g., the taps of non-Alpine Los Angeles, New York, or Texas.
Questions about the purity and source of certain bottled waters have occasionally led to a loss of consumer confidence. In 1990, Perrier was found to contain excess benzene, which led to a costly and embarrassing recall. Other bottled waters have been found to contain mold, algae, glass, fecal coliforms, and—in Texas in 1994—crickets. In 2007, Pepsi was pilloried for identifying the source of Aquafina water as “P.W.S.”; now its labels explain that means “public water source”—aka tap water.
Most controversially, the definition of springwater has been modified numerous times. What is a spring? Technically, it is a water source that originates from underground that is not directly influenced by rain or runoff. In 2003, Poland Spring faced a class-action suit alleging its water was not springwater but “treated groundwater,” a seeming splitting of hairs but an important legal and marketing distinction. Without admitting fault, Nestlé agreed to settle the case with a $10 million payment to charity.
Protests against bottled water periodically flared in big cities and on college campuses, but the movement gained national attention when Alice Waters, the celebrated chef of Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, CA, joined Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign, to encourage restaurants and cities to eschew bottled water in favor of tap. She objected to a multitude of sins: corporate ownership of water resources; the use of plastic bottles; the quality of the water in bottles; the many hidden costs of pumping, shipping, storing, and serving bottled water; and the carbon footprint created by shipping heavy loads of water over great distances.
“Bottled water is a blight on the globe—it’s a train speeding over a cliff!” she told me. “We have to stop using up all of our resources and get off that train. I know that restaurants are certainly making money on bottled water, no question. But you have to balance these things out. For me, it’s become a matter of principle.”
Chez Panisse used to serve San Pellegrino, an Italian mineral water, by the caseload. But as of late 2007, the restaurant has used only filtered tap water, which it serves in glass decanters. Other restaurants in the Bay Area have done the same thing. Like New York, San Francisco has such high-quality water (from Hetch Hetchy) that it doesn’t have to filter it. Alice Waters filters all the water used at Chez Panisse “just to be sure” and bought a machine that adds nitrogen bubbles for those who prefer their water fizzy.
When I asked what prompted her to sacrifice San Pellegrino, which was a popular moneymaker, Waters explained that bottled water took up a lot of storage room, but the main reason was that “San Pellegrino was bought by Nestlé. They want to portray themselves as ‘environmentalists,’ but I just cannot take Nestlé’s money. They give with one hand and take with the other.”
Kim Jeffery, CEO of Nestlé Waters North America, disputed this. “I called her and said, ‘Alice, if you’re attacking bottled water for its carbon footprint, how come you’re bringing all those wines from Italy? [Sonoma] has great wines close to you. Why not use them? And if you don’t want to bring water from Europe, why not use a local brand?’ ” Waters, he said, replied, “Italian wine prices are just so good, we can’t not use them.” Jeffery harrumphed, “C’mon, man, that’s not a serious response.”
He characterized Waters’s stance as typical of well-intentioned but ill-informed anti-bottled-water activists. “In America we get a little bit of information and we want to save the world, but we don’t attack the root problems,” said Jeffery. “We should not try to adjudicate who’s got a license to operate their business. We should focus on using less resources in general. That would make a lot more difference than boycotting bottled water.”
Alice Waters has inspired other restaurateurs, such as Mario Batali and the Bastianich family, whose restaurants, such as Del Posto and Babbo, serve tap water in New York. But not everyone is convinced. Drew Nieporent, whose Myriad Restaurant Group operates Nobu, Tribeca Grill, Corton, and many other restaurants in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and California, said, “The politics are taking over. Whether it’s serving foie gras, or veal, or bottled water, there’s all this shouting. As a restaurateur, what am I going to do—not sell wine because it has sulfates in it? That’s crazy! The fact of the matter is, the public wants wine from France, and it wants bottled water. And guess what? We’re making money on it. Personally, I like the convenience. At home in New Jersey we have terrible municipal water. So we have a big dispenser of Poland Spring—even the dog drinks it. I think the anti-bottled-water stuff will blow over.”
Indeed, many restaurateurs rely on the bottled water markup to help cover their rent. Clark Wolf, a Manhattan restaurant consultant, walked me through the math. If a restaurant can buy water for, say, $.98 a bottle wholesale and retail it for $6 to $8 a bottle (prices shift constantly)—or more, such as the $90 a bottle Bling can charge for its water in Las Vegas—the appeal is obvious. “I’d estimate that the restaurant industry takes in about $200 to $350 million a year from bottled water,” Wolf said in. “That’s a lot of money. So I’m not surprised that all chefs are not jumping on Alice Waters’s bandwagon.”
But the anti-bottled-water campaign has gained. In 2007, Tappening, an activist marketing group, created a series of ads asserting falsehoods such as “Bottled Water Causes Blindness in Puppies” and “Bottled Water Makes Acid Rain Fall on Playgrounds,” with the tagline “If bottled water companies can lie, we can too.” In 2008, the US Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution to bring attention to the issue. New York launched an ad campaign to promote the benefits of tap water; Boston and Salt Lake City signed on to the campaign, and San Francisco banned city-funded purchases of bottled water. Faith-based groups, such as the National Coalition of American Nuns, have joined the anti-bottled-water campaign in the belief that water, like air, should be considered a God-given resource that should not be sold for profit. “Our faith tells us to be just and not exploit the poor,” said Sister Mary Ann Coyle, who regards drinking bottled water “a sin.” In 2010, Congress considered a bill that would impose a 4 percent tax on bottled water to pay for improvements to municipal water systems, after a broken water main let 2 million Massachusetts residents without potable water.
In the mid-2000s, Nestlé’s water business saw annual growth rates of 15 percent a year, as Americans’ per capita consumption of bottled water spiked from sixteen gallons in 2000 to twenty-nine gallons in 2007. But its US sales fell 13 percent, to $4.2 billion, between 2007 and 2009. The company’s efforts to open new bottling operations have been contentious in some parts of the country. After six years of attempting to use a spring in Northern California, Nestlé bowed to critics and let. It took six years of litigation for the company to reach a settlement over using a spring in Michigan, and it had to agree to forty-four conditions before it was allowed to use a source in Colorado. In 2010, Nestlé was fighting activists over the use of springs in Oregon and Idaho.
Kim Jeffery of NWNA bristled at the criticism and complained that emotion had clouded the facts. A typical Nestlé plant, he says, draws 150 million gallons of water annually—about the same as a golf course or a large farm—and is too closely watched by state regulators for it to deplete water supplies. “We use less water per gallon of finished product than any other beverage,” Jeffery said. “Soft drinks use three gallons of water to make one gallon of soda. Beer uses a four-to-one ratio. Milk and hamburgers use a lot more. Agriculture uses seventy percent of the nation’s water. We use an infinitesimal amount compared to them. Let’s not attack the ass end of the elephant here.”
As for the plastic problem? “Thousands of beverages come in plastic bottles—Gatorade uses a thick plastic bottle that weighs five times what Nestlé bottles do. Has anybody suggested that we should stop drinking Gatorade? I don’t think so.” The half-liter bottle Nestlé introduced in 2010 is the lightest on the market, using 9.1 grams of plastic instead of the usual nineteen grams, representing a 20 percent reduction in plastic. “Recycling is something we take very seriously,” said Jeffery. “But why should bottled water carry the whole load? If you want to get serious about plastic, you need to look at the entire packaged-food business.”
It is a fair point, and it gets at a deeper issue.
Society has prized convenience over all else and has been willing to pay exorbitant amounts for seemingly cheap, healthful products such as bottled water. But today, as Americans contend with a sot economy, have taken an interest in high-quality food, and have adopted a less consumerist and more environmentally aware lifestyle, the value—perceived and actual—of bottled water is shifting. Only a few years ago, Hummers and Marlboro cigarettes were status goods; now they are regarded as symbols of poor judgment, at least among the intelligentsia. Bottled water hasn’t quite fallen into that category yet, but it runs the risk.
As Robert Glennon, a water-law expert at the University of Arizona, notes, “The problem of bottled water is it’s a new, unexpected, and hundred-percent consumptive use—unlike irrigation, for instance, which allows some water to return to the soil. Once you put water in a bottle, it’s gone. Because of this, it raises the issue in the most profound way: ‘Whose water is it?’ “
The latter is an essential question, and it lies at the heart of the growing resource wars gripping many parts of the country. In Alaska, which is proud to identify itself as a “resource state,” the water needs of the mineral, fishing, and fuel industries have collided in a struggle that made national headlines, thanks in part to Sarah Palin’s involvement, and has global implications.