Water Bottle Righteousness

At some point along the way I apparently took a nap and woke up to find everyone I know packing… not a firearm but a water bottle. Picnics, board meetings, hotel rooms, gyms almost overnight seem incomplete without water bottles. Ever increasing amounts of precious shelf space at grocery stores and supermarkets are filled with H₂o in bottles that increasing look like fashion accessories.

Brands like Fiji, Poland Springs, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani are household names, and we now pay two, three, even four times the price of a gallon of gas for something we used to get (and still can) basically for free at taps in our homes and drinking fountains everywhere else.

For many bottled water has come to represent a curious sort of righteousness in the midst of a culture fearful of contaminates and obesity. But at what cost? Creative marketing that has turned something free into a 15 billion a year market in America. That was last year. This year projections suggest we collectively will spend 16 billion.

But it is just water right? Yes… until you start to think of the huge costs of moving 1 billion water bottles we drink in a week. Charles Fishman in an article in Fast Company magazine unpacks the real costs of the water industry along with an intriguing and disturbing history of this ballooning industry that reminds me a bit of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. He notes that our billion-bottles-of-water-a-week represent a weekly convoy equivalent of 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water (which is so heavy that trucks can’t be fully loaded and still drive).

In a world where 1 in 6 people still don’t have safe and reliable drinking water, we big bottled water drinkers support an industry of “packaging and presentation” (Fishman’s words). One example is Fiji Water—the current celebrity water. Fiji ships 1 million bottles a day out of a country where half of the people don’t have a reliable drinking water for themselves.

Ironically, 25% of the water we purchase bottled is literally just tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi.

Read Fishman’s article for yourself. He drills deep enough to note positives as well as negatives, but my personal commitment after a swig and swallow is to attempt to cut my bottled water consumption to just a fraction… situations where bottled is the only option. By myself I probably can’t solve the situation, but then again, I bet every drop not bottled helps.