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Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad
How did a substance that falls from the air, springs from the earth and comes out of your tap become a hyperactive multibillion-dollar business?by Sophie Elmhirst
Thu 6 Oct 2016 01.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 28 Nov 2017 08.39 ESTThe dress code of the clientele in Planet Organic, Notting Hill is gym chic. On a hot day in mid-August, the men wore mid-thigh shorts, pectoral-enhancing vests, neon Nikes; the women were in black leggings and intricate ensembles of sports bras and cross-strapped Lycra. They had all either just worked out, were about to work out, or wanted to look as if working out was a constant possibility.
They examined the shelves. As well as the usual selection of kale crackers and paleo egg protein boosters, there were promises of wizardry, such as a packet of Alchemy Organic Super Blend Energy Elixir (£40 for 300g of powder). But never mind the food. Life, in 2016, is liquid. Opposite a display of untouched pastries and assorted bread products (who, in Planet Organic in Notting Hill, still eats bread?), were the waters.
There was Life, Volvic, Ugly, Sibberi (birch or maple), Plenish, What A Melon watermelon water, Vita Coco, Coco Pro, Coco Zumi, Chi 100% Pure Coconut Water, Rebel Kitchen Coconut Water and coconut water straight from the nut (“you have to make the hole yourself”, explained a shop assistant). Also: an electrolyte-enhanced water pledging to hydrate you with 40% less fluid than ordinary water (Overly Fitness), a birch water offering “a natural source of anti-oxidising manganese” (Tapped) and an alternative birch water promising to “eliminate cellulite” (Buddha). There was also a “water bar” – a tap in the corner of the shop – that, according to the large sign hanging from the ceiling, offered, for free, the “cleanest drinking water on the planet”, thanks to a four-stage process conducted by a “reverse osmosis deionising water filter”.Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad – podcastPlanet Organic’s display was impressive, but only hinted at the full range of waters available to the hydration-conscious consumer. Right now, the global bottled water industry is in one of those strange and energetic boom phases where every week, it seems, a new product finds its way on to the shelves. Not just another bland still or sparkling, but some entirely new definition of the element. It is a case of capitalism at its most hyperactive and brazenly inventive: take a freely available substance, dress it up in countless different costumes and then sell it as something new and capable of transforming body, mind, soul. Water is no longer simply water – it has become a commercial blank slate, a word on to which any possible ingredient or fantastical, life-enhancing promise can be attached.And it’s working. Over the past two decades, bottled water has become the fastest-growing drinks market in the world. The global market was valued at $157bn in 2013, and is expected to reach $280bn by 2020. Last year, in the UK alone, consumption of water drinks grew by 8.2%, equating to a retail value of more than £2.5bn. Sales of water are 100 times higher than in 1980. Of water: a substance that, in developed countries, can be drunk for free from a tap without fear of contracting cholera. What is going on? ‘Rumours circulated of Madonna bathing in bottled water, and Jack Nicholson was photographed brandishing a bottle of Evian at the Oscars as if it were Cristal.’
For a substance that falls out of the sky and springs from the earth of its own accord, water has always had an extraordinary commercial lure. According to James Salzman, the author of Drinking Water: A History, monks at holy wells produced special water flasks for pilgrims to take away as proof of their visit – a medieval example of the power of branding. For centuries, wealthy Europeans travelled to spa towns to sample the water in a bid to cure specific ailments. The spa visit was a signal of health, but also of status: somewhere to be seen, an association of liquid and individual that broadcasted social elevation – a distant precursor to Kim Kardashian clutching a bottle of Fiji, if you like. In 1740, the first commercial British bottled water was launched in Harrogate. By 1914 Harrogate Spring was, according to its website, the largest exporter of bottled water in the country, “proudly keeping the troops hydrated from England to Bombay”.

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In the early 20th century, however, a water revolution nearly killed the nascent business. After early attempts in Germany and Belgium to chlorinate municipal drinking water, a typhoid epidemic in Lincoln in 1905 prompted the public health crusader Alexander Cruickshank Houston to try out the first extended chlorination of a public water supply. His experiment worked, and soon, chlorination of municipal water had spread around the world. In 1908, Jersey City became the first US city to use full-scale water chlorination, and the practice quickly spread across the country.The bottled water industry almost collapsed as a result. In the past, buying clean water had been a necessity for the rich (the poor simply endured centuries of bad drinking water, and often died from the experience). Now it was freely available to all. Why would you continue to spend money on something that now came, miraculously, out of a tap in your kitchen?The answer arrived in 1977, in the form of what must be one of history’s greatest pieces of television advertising narration. “Deep below the plains of southern France,” rumbled Orson Welles in a voice that sounded as if it were bubbling up from some unreachable subterranean cave, “in a mysterious process begun millions of years ago, Nature herself adds life to the icy waters of a single spring: Perrier.” As viewers watched the water descend into a glass, and admired the glistening green bottle, marketing history was made. The advert was part of a $5m campaign across America – the largest ever for a bottled water – and proved a major success. From 1975 to 1978, Perrier sales in the US increased from 2.5m bottles to more than 75m bottles.The Perrier triumph was part of “a perfect confluence”, Salzman told me, of a sudden craze for aerobics in the US, prompted, in part, by Jane Fonda releasing her first exercise video – Jane Fonda’s Workout, the highest-selling video of all time – in 1982. There was a new drive not just to be healthy, but to be seen to be healthy. In 1985, Time magazine noted that “water snobbery has replaced wine snobbery as the latest noon-hour recreation. People order their eau by brand name, as they once did Scotch.”Soon enough, rumours circulated of Madonna bathing in bottled water, and Jack Nicholson was photographed brandishing a bottle of Evian at the Oscars as if it were Cristal. There was also a key practical innovation: in 1977, plastic or PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles were introduced into the soft drink market. By 1990, they were being used for bottled water, making it as convenient and portable as a fizzy drink. The big soft drink brands, spotting the obvious commercial opportunity, soon launched their own waters: PepsiCo’s Aquafina in 1994, Coca-Cola’s Dasani in 1999, and Nestlé’s Pure Life in 2002. Water was back.Water’s glorious renaissance wasn’t just about fashion or convenience. Bottled water can be marked up like no other substance on earth. The £1 that a bottle of water often costs could pay for around 1,000 gallons of tap water. Some waters – Evian, Perrier, Highland Spring and Harrogate Spring – come from natural sources, so at least you feel you’re paying for geography, for the fantasy of a shepherd sitting on a rock catching the icy flow in a glass jar specifically for your pleasure. But plenty of bottled waters are simply refashioned tap water.In February 2004, Coca-Cola attempted to launch Dasani in the UK. (“Dasani”, by the way, means nothing.) Five weeks later, the company took all 500,000 bottles off the shelves after headlines such as the Daily Star’s “Are They Taking Us For Plonkers!” Coca-Cola had followed its successful strategy in the US and purified tap water, added some mineral salts, and was selling it for 95p a bottle. The company hadn’t, however, accounted for Britain’s long memory for sitcom storylines – in this case, the episode of Only Fools and Horses when Del Boy and Rodney bottle tap water in their flat and sell it as Peckham Spring. Then there was the issue of a batch of minerals contaminating Dasani with a possibly carcinogenic bromate. In a little more than a month, Dasani was dead.Ten years later, Coca-Cola launched a new bottled water in the UK. In the intervening decade, the industry, after a brief dip following the 2008 financial crash, had entered its hyperactive new phase. Vita Coco – one of the first of the “new” waters – came to the UK in 2009, and in its wake soon appeared a flotilla of further coconut waters (the coconut water market is now worth £100m in the UK).The industry received a further boost this year from the former chancellor George Osborne, who announced a sugar tax on soft drinks in his final budget. As the “plain” bottled water market continued to expand, new inventions began to spring up. “Strong established growth leads to offshoots,” explained Richard Hall, chairman of Zenith International, a market research company that organises the annual and thrillingly named Global Bottled Water Congress. Water had begun its reinvention: enter maple, birch, energy and even ocean.Coca-Cola’s new water is called Glacéau Smartwater. The water, which comes from a spring in Morpeth, Northumberland, is “vapour distilled”, then injected with electrolytes. In other words, the water is evaporated and then condensed again, a process Coca-Cola describes as being “inspired by the clouds”.Ten years ago, this, surely, would have got the Peckham Spring treatment from the media. But we live in new times. Glacéau Smartwater is now worth £21.9m, and, earlier this year, Coca-Cola announced an investment of £15m to expand the factory where it is produced. At present, it turns out 56,000 bottles of water per hour.
 ‘It is no longer enough for water to simply be water: it must have special powers’.
If the last decade witnessed water’s great commercial expansion, 2016 could perhaps be defined as the year the market lost its mind. There now seems to be no limit on what a water can be, or what consumers are willing to buy. It is no longer enough for water to simply be water: it must have special powers.This summer alone saw the launch of Flõ Essence Water, Omega Enhanced Health Water, BiPro Protein Water and Svalbarði polar iceberg water. Other recent additions include blk. water (black water), FATwater (water containing “quality fat”) and deep ocean water harvested from off the coast of Hawaii (which allegedly hydrates you twice as fast as “normal” water). In July, the Evening Standard ran an article that only semi-ironically described water as a “superdrink”.
Powering this proliferation of new brands is a new breed of start-upper: the water entrepreneur. I met one such man – a 27-year-old named Rahi Daneshmand – in Planet Organic on that hot August day, doling out samples of his new product, Virtue Energy Water. Virtue offers, in a 250ml can (£1.35), a sugar-free sparkling water that contains “yerba maté”, ginseng, citric acid, guarana and natural fruit flavours, and offers a “natural” caffeine hit equivalent to a cup of coffee. It comes in two flavours, berries and lemon and lime. The response from the clientele was varied: “More fun than normal water!” said one woman, taking a sip. “It’s not too sweet,” approved another. “I’m trying to avoid sweetness.” Some were a little bemused. “Natural caffeine? What’s that?” asked a younger customer. “Is it for the 3pm slump or after clubbing? What’s it for?”
Virtue is Daneshmand’s big idea. In fact, it’s his second big idea – after Virtue Iced Tea, which did quite well (it’s stocked on Ocado). In his mind, iced tea has now been surpassed by the great hope of his new creation, which he claims is Britain’s first ever naturally sugar-free energy water. Daneshmand is a committed, joyous entrepreneur. After a few childhood years in Iran, he moved back to England with his family, went to Newcastle University, and somewhere along the way picked up the look and accent of an indefatigably cheerful rugby player. He wears polo shirts, lives by mantras – “nothing in life is worth getting stressed about” – and is the kind of hyper-motivated person who reads two business books in a weekend. (In mid-August: Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organisation and Ego is the Enemy.)
Daneshmand says he went into water because he wanted to make something pure. “Water is something that everyone needs and something that everyone drinks,” he explained. “We went with the term water because it has zero sugar.”
This, he pointed out, is not always the case. Many of the so-called “waters” crowding the market are jammed with sugar. Coca-Cola’s Glacéau Vitaminwater (“vitamins. electrolytes. unstoppableness”) used to contain 23g of sugar, until the public outcry forced the company to start swapping sugar for the sweetener stevia. (Then there was a subsequent outcry about the new taste, so it swapped back.)
“People are just trying to put water into everything,” said Daneshmand, shaking his head. His water, from the mains supply, is subject to “ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis” to remove minerals and make it “clean”. Its added ingredients are entirely natural. On this point, Daneshmand is evangelical: “That’s what a water is and what a water should always be.”
One afternoon this summer, I watched Daneshmand pitch his water to Rahil Vora, managing director of the health food chain Revital. Things seemed to be going well. It was a fiercely hot day, which made any cold liquid seem appealing, and there was the happy synchrony that both Virtue and Revital had incorporated a leaf into their logo. Moreover, Vora was buying into the concept. “I like the fact that it’s an energy ‘water’ rather than an energy ‘drink’,” he said. He liked the can, too – more environmentally friendly than a plastic bottle – and the natural ingredients, yerba mate in particular.

Where your favourite bottled water comes from – in pictures“You know about it?” said Daneshmand, almost disappointed. “In south America they drink it religiously – it’s their equivalent of tea.”
Vora didn’t need schooling. “It’s going to pick up as a trend,” he said. “Give it a year and you’ll see it become not quite as big as green tea but … it’s one of those ingredients.”
“Yeah,” said Daneshmand. “We put the accent on the maté as I think people were reading it as yerba mate.”
New water samples were arriving on Vora’s desk every week. “It’s a fashion thing,” he said. “Water in a can was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” Water in a can? “Literally. I got sent a box of samples. And it was just water. In a can.”
Vora shook his head in disbelief. No yerba mate, no aloe, nothing – 330ml for 99p. Vora paused. “For water, though.”
Water in a can, it turned out, was CanO water, launched by three young British entrepreneurs in January this year. I went to see them in their office in Stanmore, north London – one room, laptops, a mini basketball hoop on the wall. Ariel Booker, 24, and Perry Fielding, 29, sat opposite each other. (Their third cofounder, Josh White, was away.) Business was going well.
Before they had formally launched, CanO had secured the right to supply London Fashion Week and a purchase order from Selfridges, which has banned all plastic bottles from its store as part of its environmental programme, Project Ocean. (CanO also managed to land a celebrity endorsement on Instagram from the model David Gandy: “No excuses not to be hydrated this summer”.) By March, CanO was stocked in Whole Foods.
I mentioned Vora’s bewilderment at their product. “We have this problem on the phone,” said Booker, the fast-talker, in a monochrome printed shirt and silver bracelet. “Without seeing it, it can be a bit mind-boggling! Why? What? How? When?”
“People just think of it as a Coke can filled with water,” said Fielding, the creative, a sun tattoo on his arm and silver chain around his neck. “It seems very unexciting when you think of it like that.”
Everything changes, they believe, when you see CanO. The water, which comes from the foothills of the Austrian alps, is packaged in a minimalist black (sparkling) or white (still) can. “The visual aspect dictates everything we do,” said Fielding. “So it’s not just a product or a company or a drink, it’s actually an aspirational brand that you’d want to buy into.” On the brand’s Instagram feed, the cans pose sexily next to MacBook Airs, old-fashioned cameras, swimming pools and YSL handbags. Water just happens to be the thing inside.
Fielding had the eureka moment last year while drinking a canned fizzy drink. “It just dawned on me, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be able to drink water out of a can?’” The can, made of aluminium, is easily recyclable and has a resealable lid – a piece of German design that means you can put the can back in your bag without worrying about it leaking.
“I think some people look at this and think it’s a gimmick,” said Fielding. “Just because we’ve packaged it nicely doesn’t actually make it a gimmick.”
The brand name, meanwhile, was their second choice. Fielding originally wanted to call the product “Water”, but lawyers informed him that you couldn’t trademark the word that simply described the contents of the can.
 ‘Even those in the bottled water industry find some of the newer arrivals perplexing.’ ‘Even those in the bottled water industry find some of the newer arrivals perplexing.’ Photograph: Larry Washburn/Getty Images/fStopThe arrival of plain water in a pretty German-engineered can feels like some kind of apex, where the market’s relentless demand for novelty has pushed a basic substance to its limit. We are surely only a small step from the unquestioned purchasing of emotions or air. (This, inevitably, is already happening: as Andrea Leadsom excitedly pointed out in her recent Tory party conference speech, a young British entrepreneur, Leo de Watts, now sells glass jars of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Welsh or Yorkshire air for £80 each, mostly to the Chinese.)
Even those in the bottled water industry find some of the newer arrivals perplexing. Everyone has their pet farce. For Ariel Booker of CanO, it was black water: “What is the need to have water that’s black?” he said. “There is none.” For Daneshmand, it was Rockstar, an American “energy water” brand that had the same sugar volume as Red Bull (9g per 100ml). “Absolutely mad, that was.”
Martin Riese, whose website describes him as “the world’s foremost expert on water”, directs his disdain at Glacéau Smartwater: “Sorry, Smartwater, but you are not a premium product,” he told me in his thick German accent. “You are a highly processed product and your water belongs in the trash can, nowhere else!” For Riese, a purist, “bottled water has to come from nature”. Any kind of processing is, he believes, “the biggest scam on planet Earth!”
Riese really, really loves water. “It started for me as a very small child,” he told me. “I was four years old, on vacation with my parents, and I was blown away by the fact that the tap water in the city tasted differently.” After school, he started working in restaurants in Germany, put together what was possibly the world’s first water menu in 2005 for a Berlin bistro, and wrote a book: Die Welt des Wassers (The World of Waters). “It’s a German book, so you’ll have to learn to read German to read it.”
 A bottle from the Luxury Collection Diamond Edition costs $100,000. It has a white gold cap set with over 850 diamondsOver the years, Riese has become part of water history. After receiving his certificate as a mineral water sommelier from the German Mineral Water Trade Association, he moved to America in 2010 and became that country’s first water sommelier. In 2013, he launched the longest water menu in Los Angeles at Ray’s and Stark Bar, and cofounded his own brand of mineral water: Beverly Hills 90H20.
This self-proclaimed “champagne of waters” quickly won FoodBev Media’s Beverage Innovation award for the “World’s Best Still or Sparkling Water”. A case of 24 500ml bottles is $72, while a bottle from the “Luxury Collection, Diamond Edition” will cost you $100,000. It has a white gold cap set with more than 850 white and black diamonds and holds the profoundly questionable honour of being the world’s most expensive bottle of water. If you buy it, Riese will present the bottle to you in person at a private water tasting anywhere in the world.
At present, Riese sommeliers at Patina, a restaurant in the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. There, he guides the diners through his water menu, helping them to select the ideal water to accompany their meal.
Riese talked me through his technique.
First: “Do you prefer sparkling or flat?”
Then: “Do you prefer your bubbles a little bit more progressive, like very intense, or do you like your bubbles a little bit on the smaller side, like champagne bubbles, very tiny?”
Finally: “Do you prefer something on the high mineral end, on the salty and bitter side, or do you prefer something on the smoother side, with a lower mineral composition, like maybe a little bit on the fruitier side?”
“People will tell you right away, then, what they want,” said Riese. Perhaps the clientele at the Patina restaurant are better versed in the mineral composition and fruity or salty aspects of water than the rest of us. At a basic level, the taste of water varies according to the total dissolved solids (TDS) it contains. These solids can be any substance, but the key elements are sodium, magnesium and calcium. Any filtered or chemically treated tap water will usually contain fewer solids than a bottled water that still carries the minerals from the water’s source, be it glacial, maple sap or spring.
Fiji water, for example, contains 210mg/L TDS, including 18mg/L sodium, 13mg/L magnesium and 18mg/L calcium. (Fiji appears to have pulled off some fairly heavy-duty trademarking, including “Untouched by man™” and “Earth’s finest water™”.) Compare those numbers to San Pellegrino, which contains quadruple the TDS, at 925mg/L, including 33.6mg/L sodium, 53.8mg/L magnesium and 178mg/L calcium. Fiji, with far fewer solids, tastes smoother, while the San Pellegrino is bolder, saltier and naturally fizzy.
Nothing, however, compares to Riese’s favourite water, the Slovenian spring water Roi. “I’m always calling it the Big Boy,” said Riese. Roi has a TDS of 7,400mg/L, including more than 1,000mg/L of magnesium. For Riese, the experience of drinking this water is extraordinary, and emotional. He sits with a glass on its own – no mixer, no food, no distraction – as if he’s drinking a rare cognac. “This is something very, very special.”
Riese knows how his obsession with water might be perceived. “Some people think I’m the biggest scam artist,” he told me. He believes that he is simply applying the principle of wine to water – terroir. The taste of natural water, just like wine, is affected by geography, earth, the rock it passes through. And Roi is the ultimate example: “It has way more electrolytes than Gatorade,” Riese said, his voice climbing in ecstasy. “Think about it! Way more electrolytes than Gatorade! But it’s from Mother Nature!”
Take an investigation into the bottled water industry to its logical conclusion and you find yourself drinking melted icebergs. Last year, the Merchant hotel in Belfast launched its water menu to a global chorus of tabloid mockery. “Would you pay £26 for a bottle of water (even if it IS from a Canadian glacier)?” ran the Daily Mail headline. Gavin Carroll, the Merchant’s general manager, gave the whole episode its only possible name: Watergate. When I visited this summer to sample the menu, he still seemed a little puzzled by the reaction. “We’re like, ‘Really? It’s just water.’” For £26? “We’re a five-star hotel. We have to offer our customers choice.”
The Merchant’s executive chef, and the chief architect of the water menu, Patrick Leonard – a man so passionate about water that before every sip I took, I could sense him shuffling to the edge of his seat in anticipation – brought out the notorious £26 bottle, called Iceberg. The water comes from the Canadian Arctic ice shelf in Newfoundland, frozen around 10,000 years ago. “They’re not allowed to remove parts of icebergs,” said Leonard, “so they have to wait until they separate. They detach naturally, and then they’re netted, brought on a boat to land and allowed to melt.”
It’s a beautiful thing, this bottle – more like a premium vodka bottle, made of thick glass, decorated with white snowflakes. Leonard poured a portion of the ancient iceberg into a tumbler. The pressure mounted; I was painfully aware that the glass of water in front of me was worth a tenner, and I still had my bottle of airport-purchased Boots’ own brand on the table. I sipped, swallowed, felt the passage of liquid down my oesophagus – and couldn’t taste anything at all. This was not a total failure of my unsophisticated palate. Melted iceberg essentially has no taste, having the lowest TDS (9mg/L) of any water on earth. It is like the ur-water, the water that pre-dates all other waters. “This is your starting point,” said Leonard, gravely. “Your baseline.”
We moved on to Whitehole Springs, a Somerset-sourced, calcium-rich still water that passes through Tufa rock; Vichy Catalan, a salty Spanish sparkler; and finally De L’Aubier Sap Water, from Canada, a byproduct of the maple syrup manufacturing process. Along the way, Leonard explained the origin of his water preoccupation: a radio interview he heard with – who else? – Martin Riese: “It just got me hooked; that was it.” For a chef already infatuated by taste, water was the natural extension. “We pay so much attention to food and wine, but we forget about the water,” he said. His favourite? Vichy Catalan. “I just had friends for dinner, and instead of bringing out the wine, I brought out three bottles of that.” He looked absolutely delighted. “It was so much fun!”
It’s hard to maintain cynicism in the face of a true enthusiast. Leonard loves water so much he has water parties. This is not to be mocked. And, I’ll admit it, tasting this quartet of waters taught its own lesson. Pay attention, as with anything, and you notice more, appreciate more. These waters tasted dramatically different from each other, had their own peculiarities and characteristics. The maple sap water was sweet, earthy; Whitehole Springs thicker and chalky. And after the featureless purity of the melted iceberg, the Vichy Catalan was like snorting peppercorns.
Of course, there is something deranged about the idea of netting an iceberg and waiting for it to melt – apparently, applying heat would ruin the taste. There is also something disturbing about paying nearly £30 for the experience of drinking the end result. But, for the connoisseur, all of this makes as much sense as buying a vintage claret instead of Jacob’s Creek, a fillet steak instead of a Peperami. Passion has no limit.
 ‘There is something deranged about the idea of netting an iceberg and waiting years for it to melt.’ ‘There is something deranged about the idea of netting an iceberg and waiting years for it to melt.’ Photograph: Larry Washburn/Getty Images/fStopAt some point, surely, we will reach “peak” water. Perhaps it will be the moment consumers lose faith in the cellulite-eradicating powers of Buddha water or wonder if it’s really worth paying over the odds for birch sap. You hope for cold logic to kick in, some sort of mass awakening to this lunatic capitalist experiment. What are we even looking for, in all these waters? The same thing, perhaps, that we are hoping to find when we buy quinoa crisps, or gluten-free seed bars: perfect health, moral relief, a sense of inner purity that somehow erases all the wine we drank last night. We want to be better people.
The peak, however, is not in sight: for now, experts can only see growth steadily increasing in the bottled water market, at 5-6% across the industry over the next five years, according to Zenith’s Richard Hall. The water entrepreneurs are yet to run out of ideas. There are waters that haven’t even been thought of yet, niches still to be fully explored. Minor brands – the endless coconut waters – will fall away over time, said the water historian James Salzman, and “you’ll be left with those who have survived, who will be purchased by the major players”.
 The water entrepreneurs are yet to run out of ideas. There are waters that haven’t even been thought of yetFor the young entrepreneurs, like CanO and Virtue, the future is about staying in the game, making a product that a consumer didn’t even know they needed six months ago, but that now inhabits their fridge door with the permanence of ketchup. In early autumn, things were going well – both Revital and Holland & Barrett had ordered Virtue for their shops and Daneshmand had meetings set up with two of the four largest supermarket chains (he was too coy to name them). CanO, meanwhile, had shipped its first orders to China, Germany and Thailand.
If there is a final frontier of water, then perhaps it is the waters now being invented for children. Zenith have forecasted that the kids’ water category is set to grow even faster than “adult” water. In August, Capri-Sun (owned by Coca-Cola) launched a range of juicy waters; last November, Volvic released its Star Wars collection, including bottles decorated with Chewbacca and Darth Vader; and in May this year, the first ever sparkling water for kids was launched in the US, called Tickle Water.
According to Heather McDowell, CEO, Tickle Water was her son’s idea. When he was two, he asked for a sip of her sparkling water, loved it, “and the next day he was like, ‘Mommy, I want tickle water!’” she told me enthusiastically. Tickle Water comes in a transparent plastic can with an aluminium lid. “So the kids can feel like they’re drinking a soda because it looks like a soda can, but the parents feel good because they see that it’s clear, plain, transparent water.”
For McDowell, if making water look like Coke means kids drink more water and less Coke, this can only be a good thing. True, undoubtedly, but somehow it feels like the final twist in water’s elaborate rebrand, the last stop on a journey that starts with turning on a tap and marvelling that something clean, healthy and potable comes out, and then pauses – for years – to watch an iceberg melt very, very slowly, and ends with a child drinking “cola” water (one of Tickle Water’s natural flavours), because he likes the style of the can.
From element to commodity, we finally got there: welcome to the age of Water™.
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
• This article was corrected on 7 October and 8 November 2016. Earlier versions misspelled the name of the water expert Martin Riese, and gave the total dissolved solids (TDS) measurements in milligrams, rather than milligrams per litre.=

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/14/bottled_water_is_a_scam_pepsico_coca_cola_and_the_beverage_industrys_greatest_con_partner/

Following is the latest in a new series of articles on AlterNet called Fear in America that launched this March. Read the introduction to the series.

The biggest con job perpetrated on the consumer is not some shady operation selling bogus cures through TV infomercials. America’s biggest snake-oil salesman is actually the beverage industry, or Big Bev, which resells the simplest and most vital product for thousands of times its value. That product is drinking water.

Multinationals like PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola Company and Nestle rake in a combined $110 billion a year selling bottled water worldwide. In the U.S. alone, more than half the population drinks bottled water, which accounts for about 30% of liquid refreshment sales, far exceeding the sales of milk and beer (only soft drinks sell more).

But the expensive water the beverage industry sells is no better — and possibly worse — than the water you get from your tap (and often, the water they sell is tap water). So how did these companies fool the public into paying a few bucks for something that costs a few pennies per gallon from a faucet?

Fear. These multinationals have spent millions on marketing to convince consumers that tap water tastes bad, contains high levels of contaminants and poses a danger to human health. Municipal water, they claim, is a scourge, and the only way you get drink healthy water is to buy it through private beverage companies, at up to 2,000 times the cost of getting it from a tap.

And it appears that their tactics are working. With some 92% of tap water meeting state and federal standards, the U.S. has the cleanest and safest public water supply in the world. Yet polls have shown that that a great majority of Americans worry a great deal about the public water supply.

To make matters worse, the supposedly healthy alternative is virtually unregulated. The water from a public utility is constantly monitored under Environmental Protection Agency standards, but bottled water does not have to meet those standards. In fact, independent testing of bottled water has indicated that microbiological impurities and high levels of fluoride and arsenic posed health concerns.

Misplaced Doubts

“Water fountains used to be everywhere, but they have slowly disappeared as public water is increasingly pushed out in favor of private control and profit,” writes Peter Gleick in his book Bottled & Sold. “[They] have become an anachronism, or even a liability, a symbol of the days when homes didn’t have taps and bottled water wasn’t available from every convenience store and corner concession stand. In our health-conscious society, we are afraid that public fountains, and our tap water in general, are sources of contamination and contagion.”

When towns and cities still didn’t have the means to provide all homes access to clean water, sanitary water fountains were a benefit to public health. The irony today is that public water is no longer viewed as a safe option, yet poorly regulated bottled water is.

Nine years ago, the high-end bottled-water brand Fiji began a marketing campaign in which it sniffed, “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland.”

Clevelanders, angered they were being unfairly insulted because of some issues with their water decades back, took action. The city’s water utility even bought some bottles of Fiji and other top brands like Dasani, Evian and Aquafina and tested them against Cleveland tap water. And guess what? Cleveland’s tap water was the purest of them all. Moreover, Fiji had a 6.31 micrograms of arsenic per bottle. While under the amount of 10 micrograms allowed by the EPA and Food and Drug Administration, it was notably high in comparison.

But Cleveland only tested a few samples of bottled water. Consumers can’t be sure what they’re getting, as the contents can vary from bottle to bottle. That’s because bottled water, which is regulated by the FDA, doesn’t have to meetthe stricter standards the EPA requires. Tap water needs to undergo regular testing for bacteria and microbes such as E. coli, while bottled water doesn’t. Further, the EPA requires water suppliers to use certified labs to test their water, but there’s no such FDA requirement for water bottlers. The bottlers also don’t need to send off reports to regulators about problems they might find with their product. There are no requirements for disinfection or filtration for bottlers that water utilities must meet. Consumers are left at the mercy of a corporation to protect them from their product.

What’s in a Name?

While Fiji water actually comes from the South Pacific Island that bears its name, close to half of the bottled water bought by consumers is nothing more than filtered tap water with fancy names, according to Food & Water Watch. Much of the bottled water Americans drink, including top brands like Aquafina and Dasani, is pretty much the same stuff you get from your own faucet, perhaps run through an additional filter by the bottler.

==

http://ecowatch.com/2015/05/11/bottled-water-companies-california-drought/

...

Last week, Starbucks announced that it would be moving the production of its “globally responsible” Ethos Water brand from California to Pennsylvania within the next six months. Its Pennsylvania facility already bottles the water sold on the east coast.

Starbucks’ senior vice president of global responsibility and public policy John Kelly said, “We are committed to our mission to be a globally responsible company and to support the people of the state of California as they face this unprecedented drought. The decision to move our Ethos water sourcing from California and reduce our in-store water reductions by more than 25 percent are steps we are taking in partnership with state and local governments to accelerate water conservation.”

Ethos Water was founded in 2002 in Southern California, promising to donate a percentage of each sale to water projects in developing countries, currently amounting to five cents on the sale of each $1.95 bottle of water. The company was bought by Starbucks in 2005. Ethos has created partnerships with organizations such as the Oscars. Environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio was seen carrying a bottle at the awards ceremony, and fellow environmentalist Matt Damon has appeared in an ad for the brand.

The move follows a recent article in Mother Jones calling attention to the fact that its West Coast bottling plant is located in Merced, California, drawing its water from private springs in Baxter a few hours north of Merced, as well as from Merced city water. Both Baxter and Merced are in areas of “exceptional drought.”

“While bottled water accounts for just a small fraction of California’s total water use, some residents are nonetheless fed up with bottling plants that profit off their dwindling water supply,” said Mother Jones. “Protesters have begun staging events at Nestlé’s bottling facility in nearby Sacramento.”

Nestlé’s facility buys millions of gallons of Sacramento municipal water and also bottles spring water shipped in from Northern California counties. A grassroots group called the Crunch Nestlé Alliance has been organizing to shut down the plant.

Residents in Merced are also concerned about the Safeway-Lucerne Foods bottling plant in the city that’s pulling groundwater from local wells as they’re being asked to cut back on showers and stop watering their lawns.

The Merced Sun-Star quoted area resident Jandrea-Marie Gabrielle saying at a city council meeting, “Perhaps watering lawns are the least of California’s worries. You might think that in the midst of a drought emergency, diverting public fresh water supplies to bottle and selling them would be frowned upon.”

And while Starbucks is closing its bottled water facility, another will soon be opening in the arid state. The Crystal Geyser Water Company will be opening a plant in Mount Shasta that will take hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day from an aquifer that feeds the Sacramento River and provides drinking water for millions of people. The converted Coca-Cola plant is expected to begin operations this fall. While a company executive said it’s working with area residents to make sure its activities “will not impact the environment in any detrimental way,” local citizen Raven Stevens pointed out, “Crystal Geyser in one day plans to pump more water than any three of my neighbors will use in an entire year.”

California currently has no limits on the amount of groundwater that can be pumped from private property, although state regulations on water withdrawal from the most endangered aquifers with start phasing in after 2020—when the drought could be a decade old. Bottled water companies using water tapped on private property are exempt from the mandatory water cuts placed on cities and towns in March.

“Bottling water is a legal use of water under the law,” said Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman of the California Department of Water Resources.

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8 Shocking Facts About Water Consumption

==

nice graphics, no links here

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/bottled-water-california-drought

Bottled Water Comes From the Most Drought-Ridden Places in the Country

Popular brands like Aquafina and Dasani source from catastrophically dry parts of the West.

By Julia Lurie | Mon Aug. 11, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

Social Title:

Your bottled water comes from the most drought-ridden places in the country

Social Dek:

Popular brands like Aquafina and Dasani source mainly from catastrophically dry parts of the West.

Update, 4/13/15: This article has been modified from its original version to include updated drought maps and information from the Desert Sun investigation [1].

Bottled-water drinkers, we have a problem: There's a good chance that your water comes from California, a state experiencing the third-driest year on record.

The details of where and how bottling companies get their water are often quite murky [2], but generally speaking, bottled water falls into two categories. The first is "spring water," or groundwater that's collected, according to the EPA [3], "at the point where water flows naturally to the earth's surface or from a borehole that taps into the underground source." About 55 percent [4] of bottled water in the United States is spring water, including Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead.

The other 45 percent comes from the municipal water supply, meaning that companies, including Aquafina and Dasani, simply treat tap water—the same stuff that comes out of your faucet at home—and bottle it up. (Weird, right?)

But regardless of whether companies bottle from springs or the tap, lots of them are using water in exactly the areas that need it most right now.

The map above shows the sources of water for four big-name companies that bottle in California. Aquafina and Dasani "sources" are the facilities where tap water is treated and bottled, whereas Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead "sources" refer to the springs themselves.

In the grand scheme of things, the amount of water used for bottling in California is only a tiny fraction of the amount of water used for food and beverage production—plenty of other bottled drinks use California's water, and a whopping 80 percent of the state's water supply goes toward agriculture. But still, the question remains: Why are Americans across the country drinking bottled water from drought-ridden California?

One reason is simply that California happens to be where some bottled water brands have set up shop. "You have to remember this is a 120-year-old brand," said Jane Lazgin, a representative for Arrowhead. "Some of these sources have long, long been associated with the brand." Lazgin acknowledges that, from an environmental perspective, "tap water is always the winner," but says that the company tries to manage its springs sustainably. The water inside the bottle isn't the only water that bottling companies require: Coca-Cola bottling plants, which produce Dasani, use 1.63 liters of water for every liter of beverage produced in California, according to Coca-Cola representative Dora Wong. "Our California facilities continue to seek ways to reduce overall water use," she wrote in an email.

Then there's the aforementioned murkiness of the industry: Companies aren't required to publicly disclose exactly where their sources are or how much water each facility bottles. Peter Gleick, author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water [5], says, "I don't think people have a clue—no one knows" where their bottled water comes from. (Fun facts he's discovered in his research: Everest water comes from Texas, Glacier Mountain comes from Ohio, and only about a third of Poland Springs [4] water comes from the actual Poland Spring, in Maine.)

A recent Desert Sun investigation [1] reported that the Nestle Waters, the company that owns Arrowhead, has been transporting water out of the San Bernadino National Forest using a permit that expired in 1988. The Forest Service hadn't examined the impacts of the bottled water industry on the region. Since the investigation, Forest Service representatives have said that examining the permit is a "priority," and Lazgin wrote [6] that Arrowhead plans to comply with the permit renewal process.

Despite the fact that almost all US tap water is better regulated [7] and monitored than bottled, and despite the hefty environmental [2] footprint of the bottled water industry, perhaps the biggest reason that bottling companies are using water in drought zones is simply because we're still providing a demand for it: In 2012 in the United States alone, the industry produced about 10 billion gallons [8] of bottled water, with sales revenues at $12 billion.

As Gleick wrote [9], "This industry has very successfully turned a public resource into a private commodity." And consumers—well, we're drinking it up.

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/bottled-water-california-drought

Links:

[1] http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2015/03/05/bottling-water-california-drought/24389417/

[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle

[3] http://www.epa.gov/ogwdw/faq/pdfs/fs_healthseries_bottlewater.pdf

[4] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/bottled-water-poland-spring-rubio

[5] http://www.amazon.com/Bottled-Sold-Story-Behind-Obsession/dp/1610911628

[6] http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2015/04/11/nestle-bottled-water-california-drought-water/25621915/

[7] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/fiji-water-when-environme_b_789503.html

[8] http://www.bottledwater.org/economics/bottled-water-market

[9] http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/04/25/bottled-water-sales-the-shocking-reality/

==

Recently, nearly 200,000 CREDO activists joined together to tell the U.S Forest Service to stop Nestle from pumping water out of a national forest in drought-stricken California. That helped put a spotlight on Nestle and launched a round of intense media scrutiny. But instead of deciding to do the right thing, as other companies like Starbucks1 have done in the face of the drought, Nestle’s CEO decided to dig in and double down. When questioned in a recent radio interview about whether they would consider halting their water extraction, Nestle CEO Tim Brown stated: “Absolutely not. In fact, if I could increase it, I would.”2

Apparently, Nestle’s CEO has spent so much time focusing on driving up Nestle’s profits at any cost that he’s apparently lost any sense of corporate responsibility when it comes to bottling water. So this time we need to up the pressure even more by sending a message directly to Nestle.

Tell Nestle CEO Tim Brown: Exercise some corporate responsibility and end your water profiteering in drought-stricken California. Click here to sign the petition.

Unfortunately, Brown’s out-of-touch comments didn’t end there. In the same interview, he went so far as to blame consumers for Nestle’s practices, at one point stating, “If I stop bottling water tomorrow, people would buy another brand of bottled water...It’s driven by consumer demand, it’s driven by an on-the-go society that needs to hydrate.” Apparently he’s never heard of a re-usable water bottle.

Perhaps it’s not a complete surprise to see Nestle respond in such a tone-deaf manner by passing the buck and shirking responsibility. After all, this is the same corporation whose CEO once famously challenged the human right to water. During that same year, Nestle fought a decision by the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario, Canada that would limit its water-taking in times of severe drought.3

"Starbucks moves Ethos water from California after droughtshaming" The Washington Post, May 12, 2015

"Nestlé Waters CEO isn't stopping bottling in California, says new tech will save millions of gallons" Southern California Public Radio, May 14, 2015

"Organizations Denounce Nestle’s New Human Rights Impact Assessment as a Public Relations Stunt," Food & Water Watch, December 19, 2013.

==

http://www.newsweek.com/nestles-california-water-permit-expired-27-years-ago-321940

==

The International Bottled Water Association is the the trade association representing U.S. and international water bottlers, distributors and suppliers. It shares the same physical address as the American Beverage Association[1]

Membership

On its website the IBWA does not disclose who its members are only stating that they "range in size from the original family-owned and operated water bottlers to giant, diversified food corporations who have added bottled water to their product lines. From the manufacturers of equipment to small distributors, to the rapidly increasing number of international members, are all important segments of the bottled water industry and IBWA."[2]

Other SourceWatch Resources

American Beverage Association

Contact Details

International Bottled Water Association (IBWA)

1700 Diagonal Road, Suite 650

Alexandria, VA 22314

Phone: 703-683-5213

Fax: 703-683-4074

Information Hotline: 1-800-WATER-11

Email: ibwainfo AT bottledwater.org

Website: http://www.bottledwater.org/

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/bottled-water-california-drought

The details of where and how bottling companies get their water are often quite murky, but generally speaking, bottled water falls into two categories. The first is "spring water," or groundwater that's collected, according to the EPA, "at the point where water flows naturally to the earth's surface or from a borehole that taps into the underground source." About 55 percent of bottled water in the United States is spring water, including Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead.

But regardless of whether companies bottle from springs or the tap, lots of them are using water in exactly the areas that need it most right now.

One reason is simply that California happens to be where some bottled water brands have set up shop. "You have to remember this is a 120-year-old brand," said Jane Lazgin, a representative for Arrowhead. "Some of these sources have long, long been associated with the brand." Lazgin acknowledges that, from an environmental perspective, "tap water is always the winner," but says that the company tries to manage its springs sustainably. The water inside the bottle isn't the only water that bottling companies require: Coca-Cola bottling plants, which produce Dasani, use 1.63 liters of water for every liter of beverage produced in California, according to Coca-Cola representative Dora Wong. "Our California facilities continue to seek ways to reduce overall water use," she wrote in an email.

Then there's the aforementioned murkiness of the industry: Companies aren't required to publicly disclose exactly where their sources are or how much water each facility bottles. Peter Gleick, author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water, says, "I don't think people have a clue—no one knows" where their bottled water comes from. (Fun facts he's discovered in his research: Everest water comes from Texas, Glacier Mountain comes from Ohio, and only about a third of Poland Springs water comes from the actual Poland Spring, in Maine.)

A recent Desert Sun investigation reported that the Nestle Waters, the company that owns Arrowhead, has been transporting water out of the San Bernadino National Forest using a permit that expired in 1988. The Forest Service hadn't examined the impacts of the bottled water industry on the region. Since the investigation, Forest Service representatives have said that examining the permit is a "priority," and Lazgin wrote that Arrowhead plans to comply with the permit renewal process.

Despite the fact that almost all US tap water is better regulated and monitored than bottled, and despite the hefty environmental footprint of the bottled water industry, perhaps the biggest reason that bottling companies are using water in drought zones is simply because we're still providing a demand for it: In 2012 in the United States alone, the industry produced about 10 billion gallons of bottled water, with sales revenues at $12 billion.

As Gleick wrote, "This industry has very successfully turned a public resource into a private commodity." And consumers—well, we're drinking it up.

===

npr

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833795

In 1976, the average American consumed a gallon and a half of bottled water each year. By 2008, the number had grown to about 30 gallons of bottled water per person in the U.S.

That amount, says Peter Gleick, "equals about 115 liters of water each year, most of it from single-serving plastic containers."

Gleick, a freshwater expert, is the author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. In the book, he examines how drinking water was commodified and branded over the past 30 years, turning what was once a free natural resource into a multibillion-dollar global industry — while raising questions about the taste and safety of drinking tap water.

"I think for the most part, we have great tap water," Gleick tells Terry Gross. "It's not always the case — but it usually is."

Gleick is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the International Water Academy. In 2001, he was named a "visionary on the environment" by the BBC. He is the president and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit environmental research institute, where he researches the connections between climate change and water use.

Tap water is poison.

—A flyer touting the stock of a Texas bottled water company.

When we're done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.

—Susan Wellington, president of the Quaker Oats Company's United States beverage division.

September 15, 2007, was a big day for the alumni, family, and fans of the University of Central Florida and the UCF Knights football team. After years of waiting and hoping, the University of Central Florida had finally built their own football stadium — the new Bright House Networks arena. Under clear skies, and with temperatures nearing 100 degrees, a sell-out crowd of 45,622 was on hand to watch the first-ever real UCF home game against the Texas Longhorns, a national powerhouse. "I never thought we'd see this, but we sure are proud to have a stadium on campus," said UCF alumnus and Knight fan Tim Ball as he and his family tailgated in the parking lot before the game. And in an exciting, three-hour back-and-forth contest, the UCF Knights almost pulled off an upset before losing in the final minutes 35 to 32.

Knight supporters were thrilled and left thirsting for more — literally. Fans found out the hard way that their new $54-million stadium had been built without a single drinking water fountain. And for "security" reasons, no one could bring water into the stadium. The only water available for overheated fans was $3 bottled water from the concessionaires or water from the bathroom taps, and long before the end of the game, the concessionaires had run out of bottled water. Eighteen people were taken to local hospitals and sixty more were treated by campus medical personnel for heat-related illnesses. The 2004 Florida building code, in effect in 2005 when the UCF Board of Trustees approved the stadium design, mandated that stadiums and other public arenas have a water fountain for every 1,000 seats, or half that number if "bottled water dispensers" are available. Under these requirements, the arena should have been built with at least twenty water fountains. Furthermore, a spokesman for the International Code Council in Washington, which developed Florida's building code, said, "Selling bottled water out of a concession stand is not what the code meant."

The initial reaction from the University was swift and remarkably unapologetic: UCF spokesman Grant Heston appeared on the local TV news to argue that the codes in place when the stadium was designed didn't require fountains. A few days after the game, as news of the hospitalizations was reverberating, University President John Hitt said, "We will look at adding the water fountains, but I have to say to you I don't think that's the answer to this problem. We could have had 50 water fountains and still had a problem on Saturday." Al Harms, UCF's vice president for strategic planning and the coordinator for the operations of the stadium, told the Orlando Sentinel, "We won't make a snap decision" about installing fountains in the new stadium. Harms did promise that they would triple the amount of bottled water available for sale, and give away one free bottle per person at the next game. Harms also said, apparently without a trace of sarcasm, "It's our way of saying we're sorry."

For some UCF students, this wasn't enough. One of them, Nathaniel Dorn, mobilized in twenty-first-century fashion. He created a Facebook group, Knights for Free Water, which quickly attracted nearly 700 members. He and several other students showed up at a packed school hearing, talked to local TV and print media, and ridiculed the school's offer of a free bottle of water. Under this glare of attention the University did an abrupt about-face and announced that ten fountains would be installed by the next game and fifty would be installed permanently.

All of a sudden public water fountains have vanished and bottled water is everywhere: in every convenience store, beverage cooler, and vending machine. In student backpacks, airplane beverage carts, and all of my hotel rooms. At every conference and meeting I go to. On restaurant menus and school lunch counters. In early 2007, as I waited for a meeting in Silicon Valley, I watched a steady stream of young employees pass by on their way to or from buildings on the Google campus. Nearly all were carrying two items: a laptop and a throw-away plastic bottle of water. When I entered the lobby and checked in at reception, I was told to help myself to something to drink from an open cooler containing fruit juices and rows of commercial bottled water. As I walked to my meeting, I passed cases of bottled water being unloaded near the cafeteria.

Water fountains used to be everywhere, but they have slowly disappeared as public water is increasingly pushed out in favor of private control and profit.

Water fountains have become an anachronism, or even a liability, a symbol of the days when homes didn't have taps and bottled water wasn't available from every convenience store and corner concession stand. In our health-conscious society, we're afraid that public fountains, and our tap water in general, are sources of contamination and contagion. It used to be the exact opposite — in the 1800s, when our cities lacked widespread access to safe water, there were major movements to build free public water fountains throughout America and Europe.

In London in the mid-1800s, water was beginning to be piped directly into the homes of the city's wealthier inhabitants. The poor, however, relied on private water vendors and neighborhood wells that were often broken or tainted by contamination and disease, like the famous Broad Street pump that spread cholera throughout its neighborhood. At the time of London's Great Exhibition in 1851, conceived to showcase the triumphs of British technology, science, and innovation, Punch Magazine wrote: "Whoever can produce in London a glass of water fit to drink will contribute the best and most universally useful article in the whole exhibition." Just three years after the Exhibition, thousands of Londoners would die in the third massive cholera outbreak to hit the city since 1800.

By the middle of the twentieth century, spectacular efforts to improve water-quality treatment and major investments in modern drinking-water systems had almost completely eliminated the risks of unsafe water. Those of us who have the good fortune to live in the industrialized world now take safe drinking water entirely for granted. We turn on a faucet and out comes safe, often free fresh water. Notwithstanding the UCF stadium fiasco, we're rarely more than a few feet from potable water no matter where we are. But those efforts and investments are in danger of being wasted, and the public benefit of safe tap water lost, in favor of private gain in the form of little plastic water bottles.

The growth of the bottled water industry is a story about twenty-first-century controversies and contradictions: poverty versus glitterati; perception versus reality; private gain versus public loss. Today people visit luxury water "bars" stocked with bottles of water shipped in from every corner of the world. Water "sommeliers" at fancy restaurants push premium bottled water to satisfy demand and boost profits. Airport travelers have no choice but to buy bottled water at exorbitant prices because their own personal water is considered a security risk. Celebrities tout their current favorite brands of bottled water to fans. People with too much money and too little sense pay $50 or more for plain water in a fancy glass bottle covered in fake gems, or for "premium" water supposedly bottled in some exotic place or treated with some magical process.

In its modern form, bottled water is a new phenomenon, growing from a niche mineral-water product with a few wealthy customers to a global commodity found almost everywhere. The recent expansion of bottled water sales has been extraordinary. In the late 1970s, around 350 million gallons of bottled water were sold in the United States — almost entirely sparkling mineral water and large bottles to supply office water coolers — or little more than a gallon and a half per person per year. As the figure below shows, between 1976 and 2008, sales of bottled water in the United States doubled, doubled again, doubled again, and then doubled again. In 2008, nearly 9 billion gallons (over 34 billion liters) of bottled water were packaged and sold in the United States and five times this amount was sold around the world, feeding a global business of water providers, bottlers, truckers, and retailers at a cost to consumers of over a hundred billion dollars.

Americans now drink more bottled water than milk or beer — in fact, the average American is now drinking around 30 gallons, or 115 liters, of bottled water each year, most of it from single-serving plastic containers. Bottled water has become so ubiquitous that it's hard to remember that it hasn't always been here. As I write this sentence I'm sitting in the cafe in the basement of the capitol building in Sacramento, California, and all I have to do is lift my eyes from my computer screen — right in front of me are vending machines selling both Dasani and Aquafina. Yet, like UCF football fans, I can't tell you where the nearest water fountain is.

Millions of Americans still drink tap water at home and in restaurants. But there is a war on for the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of tap water drinkers, a huge market that water bottlers cannot afford to ignore. The war on the tap is an undeclared war, for the most part, but in recent years, more and more subtle (and not so subtle) campaigns that play up the supposed health risks of tap water, or the supposed health advantages of bottled water, have been launched by private water bottlers.

How do you convince consumers to buy something that is essentially the same as a far cheaper and more easily accessible alternative? You promote perceived advantages of your product, and you emphasize the flaws in your competitor's product. For water bottlers this means selling safety, style, and convenience, and playing on consumer's fears. Fear is an effective tool. Especially fear of sickness and of invisible contamination. If we can be made to fear our tap water, the market for bottled water skyrockets.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, therefore, when I opened my mailbox and found a flyer with a cover image of a goldfish swimming in a glass of drinking water. "There is something in this glass you do not want to drink. And it's not the fish," shouted the bold and colorful text in the mailer, offering me home delivery of bottles of Calistoga Mountain Spring Water. "How can you be sure your water is safe? Take a closer look at the water in our glass. Can you tell if it's pure? Unfortunately, you can't." And the solution offered? The "Path to Purity" lies with bottles of water, delivered to your door by truck, under a monthly contract.

"Tap water is poison!" declares another flyer my neighbor Roy received in the mail in early 2007 touting the stock of Royal Spring Water Inc., a Texas bottled water company. "Americans no longer trust their tap water. . . . Clearly, people are more worried than ever about what comes out of their taps." Roy, a thoughtful guy, told me he was actually more worried about what came out of his mailbox than his tap. The website of another bottler says, "Tap water can be inconsistent. . . . The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reported that hundreds of tap water sources have failed to meet minimum standards."

These attacks could be dismissed as the inappropriate actions of a few small players, except that some of the world's biggest bottlers have also targeted tap water. In 2000, shortly before he was made chairman of PepsiCo's North American Beverage and Food division, Robert S. Morrison publicly declared, "The biggest enemy is tap water. . . . We're not against water — it just has its place. We think it's good for irrigation and cooking." That same year, Susan Wellington, president of the Quaker Oats Company's United States beverage division, candidly told industry analysts, "When we're done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes." "We need to change the way we sell water," said industry analyst Kathleen Ransome at the 2006 International Bottled Water Association annual convention in Las Vegas. "At what point will consumers turn to the tap?"

Subtler advertising approaches also play on our fears. PepsiCo hired actress Lisa Kudrow to promote Aquafina with the phrase "So pure, we promise nothing" in a campaign Brandweek magazine jokingly called the "Nothing" campaign. Kinley in India offers "Trust in every drop," while another Indian bottler, Bisleri, advertises "Bisleri. Play safe."

Officially, the large bottled water industry associations advise their members to refrain from attacks on tap water. Some bottled water companies have signed up to the International Bottled Water Association's voluntary code of advertising, "which encourages members not to disparage tap water." Alas, as Captain Barbossa notes in the popular movie Pirates of the Caribbean, "the code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules," and even the bottled water associations cannot resist making critical comments about tap water. "The difference between bottled water and tap water is that bottled water's quality is consistent," said Stephen Kay, IBWA spokesman in May 2001, implying, of course, that tap water quality isn't and thus worse. In 2002, Kay said, "Some people in their municipal markets have the luxury of good water. Others do not." Similarly, the website of the Australasian Bottled Water Association pokes barbs at tap water, saying, "Some people also wish to avoid certain chemicals used in the treatment of public water supplies, such as chlorine and fluoride, and are therefore turning to the chemical-free alternative."

In the fall of 2007 I attended the IBWA annual convention in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a pretty incongruous place to hold a bottled water convention. Planted in the heart of one of the driest regions in the United States, it has very limited access to water. Yet the IBWA's major social event is a golf tournament played on water-intensive grass that consumes precious, limited water. The bottled water convention itself is a cross between a pep rally, a political campaign meeting, and a how-to seminar for individuals hoping to cash in on the bottled water craze. I wandered from session to session, from discussions of marketing strategies to closed-door meetings on how to deal with new regulatory efforts by federal agencies. I listened to talks on how to counter the efforts of anti-bottled water activists and watched demonstrations of the latest machines for bottling water. The culmination of the convention was the keynote presentation of Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which promotes a libertarian, free-market agenda. Smith extolled the virtues of a world where business entrepreneurs could make money selling water in bottles. The problem, Smith told me afterward, without a hint of irony, was that water "suffers most from being treated as a common property resource." Smith believes that "water policy could benefit greatly from exploring the strategies that have been used to produce oil."

It is this belief that water is fundamentally no different than oil or any other private commodity that lies at the heart of the controversy over selling water. A few months after the IBWA convention, Smith's Competitive Enterprise Institute launched a special project called "Enjoy Bottled Water" in which they criticize the safety of tap water, ridicule opponents of bottled water, and promote the industry's merits. "Bottled water is substantially different from tap water," the CEI website declares. "When compared to bottled water, risks appear to be somewhat higher for tap water. . . . Available data indicates that bottled water has a better safety record." The CEI is so ideologically anti-regulation that the site says, "The fact that anyone would want to ban or regulate a healthy and safe option like bottled water is really absurd." It may come as no surprise to note that Coca-Cola, maker of Dasani bottled water, was the largest single supporter of CEI's annual fundraising dinner in 2008.

The campaign against municipal tap water has been more than just words. In 2001, documents found on a Coca-Cola company website revealed that it had a formal program to actively discourage restaurant customers from drinking tap water. Working with the Olive Garden restaurant chain, Coca-Cola developed a six-step program to help the restaurant reduce what they call "tap water incidence" — the unprofitable problem of customers drinking tap water rather than ordering revenue-producing beverages. "Some 20 percent of consumers drink tap water exclusively in Casual Dining restaurants," the program lamented. "This trend significantly cuts into retailer profits. . . . Research was conducted to better understand why tap water consumption is so prevalent and why consumers are making this beverage choice. . . . This research provides the valuable insight and understanding needed to convert water drinkers to profit-producing beverages."

These documents, very quickly pulled from official websites when the media picked up the story, had already been downloaded and reposted elsewhere. "This is awesome," commented one reader. "It's what corporations say to each other behind customers' backs, only it happens to be on the Web where mortals can see it."

It isn't just bottled water companies that have tap water in their sights. Full-service restaurants have recognized the profit-generating potential of bottled water. Servers in restaurants operated by the Omni Hotels and Resorts, for example, are trained to describe "the characteristics of the waters being offered and are also trained to approach the table with chilled bottles of water. They offer it to the guest as an option to tap water," according to Fernando Salazar, corporate director of the food and beverage division in 2006. "It's just part of the server's presentation to offer bottled water first before offering tap water," says Salazar. "Those restaurants that are not yet doing this are missing an opportunity to increase profits."

Brita, a subsidiary of the Clorox Company that sells home water filters, has also been particularly aggressive in maligning tap water, which is their direct competitor in the home market. One of Brita's advertising campaigns claimed that a Brita filter "turns tap water into drinking water." Other Brita ads say, "We'd like to clear up a few things about tap water." "Tap water becomes wonderful water." "Too often, impurities are finding their way into the water. While you may not be able to see them, you don't want them." One of Brita's television ads aired in the United States and Canada took a particularly graphic approach, with the camera focused on a glass of water in a kitchen. Viewers watch the glass drain and then refill to the background sound of a flushing toilet. Superimposed on the image were the words "Tap and toilet water come from the same source," and the voice-over at the end of the commercial asked viewers: "Don't you deserve better?" In the magazine version, the advertising copy read, "You deserve better than the water you mop with."

These efforts sparked the ire of both the American Water Works Association, which represents municipal water agencies, and its Canadian counterpart. The Associations publicly objected to Brita's "unsavory tactics" and called on Brita to cancel the commercials. Advertising Standards Canada, which regulates advertising, received eleven formal complaints and after reviewing the ads ruled that they "conveyed an inaccurate representation of a product/service/ commercial activity; omitted relevant information; unfairly demeaned, disparaged, and discredited another product/service/commercial activity (i.e., municipally supplied water); and misled consumers by playing upon their fears of the safety of drinking water."

Looking at the massive growth in bottled water consumption, it is apparent that the bottled water companies have been winning the war against tap water. And in one of their latest campaign tactics, the bottled water industry is now arguing in debates, Congressional testimony, advertising, and media campaigns that the growth of bottled water sales doesn't come at the expense of tap water, but rather other commercial beverages. In 2003, Stephen Kay, spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association, told E — The Environmental Magazine that "bottled water's competition is soft drinks, not tap water." In 2006, he told the Chicago Tribune's "Morning Call" column that "bottled water's competition is not your faucet but the soft drinks, juices, sport drinks, and teas that people buy while they're on the go."

The industry continues to push this argument. In August 2007, they bought full-page ads in the New York Times and other papers. "Whether it comes from a faucet or a bottle, drinking water is an easy step people can take to lead a healthier lifestyle. So, as far as we're concerned, the drink in everyone's purse, backpack, and lunch box should be water." In December 2007, in testimony to the U.S. Congress, the IBWA President, Joe Doss, said, "Consumers also choose bottled water over other beverages because it does not contain calories, caffeine, sugar, artificial flavors or colors, alcohol and other ingredients."

Bottled water consumption is good, the industry argues, because the growth of bottled water sales has come not at the expense of tap water, but of other beverages.

This is an intriguing and potentially powerful argument, except that it is false. After hearing the industry repeat this claim over and over, I went and looked up the actual numbers. Are we really drinking bottled water instead of soft drinks and other consumer beverages, as the industry argues, or are we actually drinking less tap water? The U.S. Department of Commerce collects and publishes excellent data on beverage consumption. Contrary to what the bottled water industry argues, the numbers show that we are buying more bottled water and carbonated soft drinks, and drinking less of everything else, including milk, coffee, tea, fruit juices, beer, wine, hard alcohol, and especially tap water.

The graph below clearly shows the growth in consumption of both soft drinks and bottled water at the expense of everything else we drink. Indeed, between 1980 and 2006, data on beverage consumption reveals that on average, each of us is actually drinking around 36 gallons per year less tap water now. With what have we replaced this water? Soda and bottled water. Over this same period of time, our consumption of carbonated soft drinks has grown by 17 gallons per person per year, our consumption of bottled water has grown by 25 gallons per person per year, and our purchases of all other beverages, including milk, juices, beer, tea, coffee, and hard liquor have dropped by 6 gallons per year.

The beverage companies are winning the war on tap water. As long as people can be made to fear tap water, they will seek out alternatives they think offer more safety. But we have to ask: is bottled water actually any safer? What do we know about what's actually in our tap water — or in the bottles of water we buy? And how safe is it to drink?

From Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water by Peter H. Gleick. Copyright 2010 by Island Press. Excerpted with permission by Island Press.

Related NPR Stories

Foreign Policy: The Big Thirsty, A World Water CrisisMarch 23, 2010

Mideast Water Crisis Brings Misery, UncertaintyJan. 7, 2010

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottled_water

Bottled water is drinking water (e.g., well water, distilled water, mineral water, or spring water) packaged in plastic or glass water bottles. Bottled water may be carbonated or not. Sizes range from small single serving bottles to large carboys for water coolers.

Contents

[hide]

1 History

1.1 Water chemistry

1.2 PET plastic bottles

2 Regulations and safety

3 Storage

4 Types of bottled water

5 Product forms

5.1 Purified water vending machines

5.2 Bottled water service

6 Global sales

7 Markets by region

7.1 Australia

7.2 European Union

7.3 Lebanon

7.4 New Zealand

7.5 Pakistan

7.6 United States

8 Consumer Information

8.1 Labeling

8.2 Consumer Information

9 Concerns about Bottled Water

9.1 Bottled Water Debates

9.2 Perceptions about Bottled Water

9.3 Pricing

9.4 Bans

9.5 Health concerns

9.6 Bottled water vs carbonated beverages

9.7 Bottled water versus tap water

10 See also

11 References

12 Further reading

13 External links

History

priestly perrier

Global sales[edit]

Global bottled water sales have increased dramatically over the past several decades, reaching a valuation of around $60 billion and a volume of more than 115,000,000 cubic metres (3.0×1010 US gal) in 2006.[25] U.S. sales reached around 30 billion bottles of water in 2008, a slight drop from 2007 levels [26]

The rate of consumption more than quadrupled between 1990 and 2005.[27] Spring water and purified tap water are currently the leading global sellers. By one estimate, approximately 50 billion bottles of water are consumed per year in the U.S. and around 200 billion bottles globally.[28]

...

epa regs stricter on tap than bottle

Globally, there is an intensifying environmental backlash against bottled water usage. As global consumption of bottled water soars, environmental groups such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Greenpeace have warned of the huge environmental footprint of the plastic in which the water is packaged.[58]

In 2001 a WWF study, "Bottled water: understanding a social phenomenon", warned that in many countries, bottled water may be no safer or healthier than tap water and it sold for up to 1,000 times the price. It said the booming market would put severe pressure on recycling plastics and could lead to landfill sites drowning in mountains of plastic bottles.[58] Also, the study discovered that the production of bottled water uses more water than the consumer actually buys in the bottle itself.[58]

Pricing[edit]

Bottled water is more expensive than municipally-supplied tap water. Tap water sources and delivery systems (taps and faucets) are fixed in place while bottled water is available at many differing price points and in a variety of size formats.

"The consumption of bottled and filtered water has dramatically increased in the United States during the past decade, with bottled water sales tripling to about $4 billion a year. More than 50% of the US population drinks bottled water and 'people spend from 240 to over 10,000 times more per gallon for bottled water than they typically do for tap water.' An annual supply of bottled water for a person who consumes 8 glasses a day would cost approximately $200; the same amount of tap water would cost approximately $0.33. In general, women are more likely to drink bottled water than men, and Hispanic women are the group most likely to drink bottled water."[57]

The Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC) states that in 2013, the average wholesale price per gallon of domestic non-sparkling bottled water was $1.21. BMC’s research also shows that consumers actually tend to buy bottled water in bulk from supermarkets (25.3%) or large discount retailers (57.9%) because it costs significantly less. Convenience stores are likely to have higher prices (4.5%), as do drug stores (2.8%). The remaining 9.5% is accounted for through vending machines, cafeterias and other food service outlets, and other types of sales.[59]

Bans[edit]

Main article: Bottled water ban

In response to environmental concerns, a few localities and U.S. colleges are banning bottled water sales.

In 2009, the small New South Wales town of Bundanoon voted to become the first town in the world to ban the selling or dispensing of bottled water.[29][60] Bundanoon caught the attention of many other cities around the world.[29][61]

After a Sydney-based beverage company wanted to open a water extraction plant in the New South Wales town Bundanoon, residents outlawed the sale of bottled water. The town continues to fight the company's proposal in court.[58] "In the same week the New South Wales state premier also banned all state departments and agencies from buying bottled water because of its huge environmental footprint, joining more than 70 cities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom that have banned bottled water in their departments."

In 2012, the town of Concord, Massachusetts became the first in the United States to ban the sale of bottled water. Specifically, sales of non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less are prohibited. The ban went into effect on January 1, 2013.

Health concerns[edit]

In the United States, bottled water and tap water are regulated by different federal agencies: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates bottled water and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates the quality of tap water. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act the EPA has set maximum contaminant levels for approximately 90 contaminants that might be found in drinking water and 15 secondary maximum contaminant levels.[62]

Often, enforcement and monitoring of water quality is uneven and irregular for both tap water and bottled water. While tap water contamination incidents must be reported promptly to the public, the same is not true for bottled water, and while contamination of bottled water does occur, many instances have never received public notice until recently (see, for example, the list of more than 100 bottled water recalls).[63]

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