The city, unhappy with the inference their water was less superior, tested Fiji water and found it contained Christopher Nielson at the time.
Despite kerbside collections and drop-off centres for recyclables in most neighbourhoods, fewer than half the bottles bought in were recycled. What happens to the rest? They end up in landfills, strewn across the countryside and in the ocean harming sea life. In fact, only 6. Most plastic is generally thought to take at least years to fully biodegrade. They are broken into smaller fragments in the ocean by light and end up harming sea life.
Greenpeace estimates that Just one piece can kill them. To imagine the amount of oil used to produce virgin plastic bottles, picture a bottle filled one quarter of the way with crude oil. In , it was estimated 17 million barrels of oil were needed to meet the demand for bottled water in America alone. Ironically, it takes more water to produce a plastic bottle than what it will carry — with around 1. Even more fuel is burned to transport or ship bottles around the world, but exact figures are hard to estimate as methods and distances vary.
Total oil consumption after transportation has been estimated at 50 million unnecessary barrels of oil. This makes it hard to justify drinking Fijian and Alp water when there are perfectly good sources of water in the USA. The excessive consumption of fossil fuels to make plastic water bottles is one of many contributors to rising carbon emissions, a key cause of climate change.
As Coca-Cola and Pepsi moved into the market, the reactions from industry watchers were decidedly mixed. The s witnessed vigorous debates—sometimes lighthearted, sometimes in earnest—over whether bottled water was of any real value to consumers, or little more than a slick swindle.
Beverage companies routinely used terms like ''mountain fresh'' and images of glaciers and snowcapped peaks to promote water that had never come within a hundred miles of a mountain, much less the Arctic. Ozarka, an old brand that had surged back on the market in the post-Perrier years, was no longer bottled in the Ozarks but rather came from springs in east Texas.
In the wake of the Aquafina and Dasani launches, a flurry of news stories emphasized the fact that, far from tapping mineral-rich mountain springs, the soda giants were merely pumping and filtering water from local municipal sources.
Many commentators found such details highly amusing, and portrayed the bottled-water business as something akin to selling ice to Eskimos—gulling consumers into paying a dollar or more for something they could essentially get for free.
In , the New York Times interviewed a gaggle of Madison Avenue ad execs for a tongue-in-cheek piece on how one might package and sell water from less-than-exotic sources, like the Hudson River.
Others didn't see much humor in the subject. In , Corporate Accountability International CAI , a corporate watchdog organization, launched a campaign called "Think Outside the Bottle" and staged blind taste tests of both tap and bottled water to prove that consumers couldn't tell the difference.
In the group's view, bottled water is a prime example of "manufactured demand": Bottled-water companies, CAI argues, first scared consumers about the safety of tap water, then seduced them with images of pure mountain streams as a carefully calculated strategy to sell them an "unnecessary product. More and more advocates also began to decry the environmental impact of bottled water, citing the oil and energy used to manufacture the bottles as well as the billions of bottles that ended up in landfills or trash incinerators each year.
And yet, bottled-water sales continued to climb, topping 8 billion gallons for the first time in and, after a slight dip during the Great Recession, surging to over 10 billion gallons in Paying money for a bottle containing nothing more than plain drinking water, once dismissed as an absurd expenditure, had become normalized in the American market.
The big soda companies were the apparent victors, opening a spigot of seemingly endless profits from a product whose raw materials could essentially be had for free. But then something curious happened. The water business turned out not to be quite the cash cow that market watchers had anticipated. Unlike with sodas and sports drinks, the beverage companies learned, very little differentiates one bottle of filtered water from another.
Consumers had deep-rooted loyalties to their favorite soda brands, but they didn't feel nearly the same attachment to water brands like Dasani and Aquafina.
Instead, they tended to grab whichever was the least expensive. In recent years, that least expensive option has more and more often been produced by a firm called Niagara Bottling, which few consumers know by name and which has no connection with the spectacular waterfall on the Canadian border.
In , Andrew Peykoff, the son of Macedonian immigrants, started a delivery business in Orange County, California, lugging five-gallon glass jugs of well water door to door for offices and homes. Peykoff christened his company Niagara Bottling, and sales grew steadily. In the s, the firm purchased its own well; in the s, it moved into the private-label market, producing house brands for grocery chains and discount club stores like Walmart and Costco.
In the bottled-water trade, it turns out, the real expense lies in the raw materials for making the bottles and in the cost of shipping those bottles to their destination. Niagara poured its profits into automation and engineering, squeezing out every last scrap of waste.
By , the firm had decreased the weight of its half-liter bottle from 23 to 12 grams. Its closest competitor, Crystal Geyser, was using a gram bottle at the time, and Niagara has since reduced its weight even further, to seven grams. The firm also introduced its so-called "Eco-Air Package"—essentially a shrink-wrapped bundle of bottles—which eliminated the cardboard tray from cases and allowed more bottles to be stacked on a single pallet. In recent years, Niagara has expanded far beyond its original California market.
It now operates 19 plants across the country, with a combined annual production of more than a billion bottles. On its highly automated lines, a bottle is molded and filled with filtered water in less than an hour, and it's shipped to customers' warehouses via precisely optimized routes. It sells at wholesale for nearly half the price of Dasani or Aquafina. As bottled water has become commoditized, Coke and Pepsi have found themselves in another bind: Soda sales peaked in the late s, and have steadily declined since.
That fall is not due just to American concerns over the calories in sugar-sweetened drinks, since sales of diet sodas have been falling since , too. But the bottled-water business hasn't proved to be a great alternative for Coke and Pepsi.
Johnston, PepsiCo's chief financial officer, had told industry analysts that the company was no longer investing in the regular bottled-water business, saying, "We don't think it creates value over time. Instead, recent action has all been in the so-called "value-added" or "enhanced" water segment, which can be further divided into two main subcategories: "flavored water" and "functional water. The "functional" category edges more into the nutritional realm, adding caffeine, vitamins, and herbal extracts to create what are marketed as "energy waters," "wellness waters," "vitamin waters," and even "protein waters.
As was the case with bottled spring and mineral waters two decades before, the enhanced-water field was originally driven by small, up-and-coming brands. In , for instance, the Talking Rain Beverage Company, a small bottled-water producer in Preston, Washington, found itself on the verge of folding after years of slumping sales, so it decided to throw its remaining resources behind a single brand in its portfolio: Sparkling ICE, a zero-calorie blend of fizzy spring water and fruit juice.
After redesigning the packaging and tinkering with new flavors, Talking Rain invested in a targeted marketing campaign in the Pacific Northwest, which paid off handsomely. Around the same time, in , Ben Weiss started selling Bai Antioxidant Infusion, a five-calorie water product infused with coffee fruit and flavored with exotic fruit juices.
After initially hawking the product from a folding table at health food stores, Weiss landed distribution agreements with Costco and Target and a promotional deal with pop star Justin Timberlake, who ended up buying a stake in the company. The enhanced-water boom even breathed new life into languishing older brands, like LaCroix Sparkling Water.
Some of us get our water for free from the tap. At that steep a price tag, you might assume buying the bottled stuff would be worth it. In most cases, you'd be wrong. For the vast majority of Americans, a glass from the tap and a glass from the bottle are virtually identical as far as their health and nutritional quality are concerned.
In some cases, publicly-sourced tap may actually be safer since it is usually tested more frequently. There are exceptions, however — people living near private wells do not enjoy the same rigorous testing as those whose water comes from public sources, and some public sources are not properly screened, as has been seen in Flint, Michigan. But if you don't get your water from a private well, there are plenty of reasons to stop shelling out for bottled water.
The first documented case of bottled water being sold was in Boston in the s, when a company called Jackson's Spa bottled and sold mineral water for "therapeutic" uses. Companies in Saratoga Springs and Albany also appear to have packaged and sold water. Across the globe, people drink roughly 10 per cent more bottled water every year, but Americans consume more packaged H2O overall than people in every other country in the world besides China.
On a per capita basis, the US ranks 6. At Last year was the first time Americans drank more bottled water than soda.
It's not cheap. But that number could be even higher, some analysts have pointed out, since most sales are for single bottles. Soda companies are aware of how lucrative bottled water can be — corporations from Coca-Cola to PepsiCo have been investing in bottled water.
But research suggests that for most Americans, the stuff in a bottle is not better for you than the stuff in your tap.
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