Boycotting the bottle

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 2008 by Janet Larsen

FROM SAN FRANCISCO to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With a number of people no longer wilting to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash obviously is growing.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water's environmental impact. The resolution noted that, with $43,000,000,000 a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, "the United States' municipal water systems are among the finest in the world."

While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco's departments and agencies, saving $500,000 each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees some time early this year.

At the launch of Corporate Accountability International's "Think Outside the Bottle" campaign in October 2007, Mayor Anderson described the "total absurdity and irresponsibility, both economic and environmental, of purchasing and using bottled water when we have perfectly good and safe municipal sources of tap water." He urged city government departments and restaurants to stop buying bottled water.

In November 2007, the city council of Chicago, beleaguered by swelling landfills and a stretched budget, placed a landmark tax of five cents on every bottle of water sold in the city in order to discourage consumption. That same month, Illinois state agencies were banned from purchasing bottled water with government funds. With 86% of used water bones in the U.S. ending up as garbage or litter instead of being recycled, switching from the bottle to the tap helps to alleviate the trash burden. New York City is urging residents to drink tap water, which is filtered naturally in the protected Catskill forest region. In Kentucky, the Louisville water utility hands out free bottles for residents to fill with "Pure Tap." Dozens of other local governments are talking up tap water and are looking into banning the bottle.

Tap water promotional campaigns would have seemed quaint a few decades ago, when water in bottles was a rarity. Now such endeavors are needed to counteract the pervasive marketing that has caused consumers to lose faith in the faucet. In fact, more than one-quarter of bottled water merely is processed tap water, including top-selling Aquafina and Coca-Cola's Dasani. When Pepsi announced in July 2007 that it would label clearly its Aquafina water as from a "public water source," it no doubt shocked everyone who believed that bottles with labels depicting pristine mountains or glaciers delivered a superior product.

Despite the less-frequent quality testing and sometimes commonplace origin of the product, bottled water consumption has soared. Annual consumption in the U.S. in 1976 was less than two gallons for every man, woman, and child; some 30 years later, Americans, on average, drink about 30 gallons of bottled water a year. All this hydration costs U.S. consumers more than $15,000,000,000 a year. The price of individual bottles of water ranges up to several dollars a gallon (and more for designer brands), while tap water is delivered directly to homes and offices for less than a penny a gallon. People complaining about three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline may start to wonder why they are paying even more per gallon for bottled water.

With sales growing 10% annually, far faster than any other beverage, bottled water now appears to be the drink of choice for many Americans--they swallow more of it than milk, juice, beer, coffee, or tea. While some industry analysts are counting on bottled water to beat out carbonated soft drinks to top the charts in the near future, the burgeoning back-to-the-tap movement may reverse the trend.

In contrast to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an incredibly wasteful product. It usually is packaged in single serving plastic bottles made with fossil fuels. Just manufacturing me 29,000,000,000 plastic bottles used for water in the U.S. each year requires the equivalent of more than 17,000,000 barrels of crude oil.

After being filled, the bottles may travel far. Nearly one-quarter of bottled water crosses national borders before reaching consumers, and part of the cachet of certain bottled water brands is their remote origin. Adding in the Pacific Institute's estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the U.S. to more than 50,000,000 barrels of oil equivalent--enough to run 3,000,000 cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1,000,000,000 barrels of oil to produce close to 650,000,000,000 individual bottles.