Message in a Bottle ~ 5th installment

 Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles' journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation--which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

The bubbles in San Pellegrino are extracted from volcanic springs in Tuscany, then trucked north and injected into the water from the source.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

Each water bottler has its own version of this oxymoron: that something as pure and clean as water leaves a contrail.

San Pellegrino's 1-liter glass bottles--so much a part of the mystique of the water itself--weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh, dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption. The bottles are washed and rinsed, with mineral water, before being filled with sparkling Pellegrino--it uses up 2 liters of water to prepare the bottle for the liter we buy. The bubbles in San Pellegrino come naturally from the ground, as the label says, but not at the San Pellegrino source. Pellegrino chooses its CO₂ carefully--it is extracted from supercarbonated volcanic springwaters in Tuscany, then trucked north and bubbled into Pellegrino.

Poland Spring may not have any oceans to traverse, but it still must be trucked hundreds of miles from Maine to markets and convenience stores across its territory in the northeast--it is 312 miles from the Hollis plant to midtown Manhattan. Our desire for Poland Spring has outgrown the springs at Poland Spring's two Maine plants; the company runs a fleet of 80 silver tanker trucks that continuously crisscross the state of Maine, delivering water from other springs to keep its bottling plants humming.

We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic.

In transportation terms, perhaps the waters with the least environmental impact are Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani. Both start with municipal water. That allows the companies to use dozens of bottling plants across the nation, reducing how far bottles must be shipped.

Yet Coke and Pepsi add in a new step. They put the local water through an energy-intensive reverse-osmosis filtration process more potent than that used to turn seawater into drinking water. The water they are purifying is ready to drink--they are recleaning perfectly clean tap water. They do it so marketing can brag about the purity, and to provide consistency: So a bottle of Aquafina in Austin and a bottle in Seattle taste the same, regardless of the municipal source.

There is one more item in bottled water's environmental ledger: the bottles themselves. The big springwater companies tend to make their own bottles in their plants, just moments before they are filled with water--12, 19, 30 grams of molded plastic each. Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year, 167 for each person. Durable, lightweight containers manufactured just to be discarded. Water bottles are made of totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, so we share responsibility for their impact: Our recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

Some of the water companies are acutely aware that every business, every product, every activity is under environmental scrutiny like never before. Nestlé Waters has just redesigned its half-liter bottle, the most popular size among the 18 billion bottles the company will mold this year, to use less plastic. The lighter bottle and cap require 15 grams of plastic instead of 19 grams, a reduction of 20%. The bottle feels flimsy--it uses half the plastic of Fiji Water's half-liter bottle--and CEO Jeffery says that crushable feeling should be the new standard for bottled-water cachet.

"As we've rolled out the lightweight bottle, people have said, 'Well, that feels cheap,'" says Jeffery. "And that's good. If it feels solid like a Gatorade bottle or a Fiji bottle, that's not so good." Of course, lighter bottles are also cheaper for Nestlé to produce and ship. Good environmentalism equals good business.

Changing Consumer Behavior One Water Bottle at a Time

Bottled water and oil - the Gulf of Mexico draws a parallel.

From an article by John Edson for Fast Company:

"....It's especially poignant to think about this relationship between oil and water in this post-Gulf-Coast-oil-disaster moment.

Water is good. Water is bad.

Ads from Evian and Brita

While we all know this, bottled water is super-convenient. It's not that we want to harm the planet, or think that our immediate need or ongoing healthy habits (water kicks soda's butt for hydration, right?) are more important. It's just that we're busy, and the bottled water is there--and we promise ourselves that we'll recycle the empties.

The fact is that tap water in my country (and probably yours if you're reading this) is super duper. If we only had a way to open the tap, grab a slug of it, put it in our pocket and dispense it at will, we'd have the convenient water that we need accessible when we want it. Fast Company did a fantastic piece about the bottled water industry here, pointing to just how this became such a thriving entity. 

Design--or design thinking, if you prefer--is tackling this problem, if not the impending problem of global drinking water shortage, in a number of inspiring ways that aim to start with the need, provide alternatives, and empower behavior change in us all......." 

read more..

Trying to get a handle on bottled water - Bill Boyne

Fairly general intro into the issues around bottled water, the problems and potentials.




From an article in the Post-Bulletin:

Selling bottled water is a big business and one that requires careful scrutiny.
That is the subject of the book "Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water" by Peter H. Gleick.

Gleick is a scientist and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, Calif. He won a MacArthur Fellowship for his studies on bottled water.

Here's how he expresses the scope of the problem: "Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy and open up a bottle of commercially produced water, and every second of every day a thousand plastic bottles are thrown away. Eighty-five million bottles a day.

"More than 30 billion bottles a year at a cost to consumers of tens of billions of dollars. And for every bottle consumed in the United States, another four are consumed around the world."

The quality of the water is another problem. Gleick writes that federal standards for quality must be observed for water provided by city and community tap water systems. That is not the case for bottled water. As a result, there have been numerous cases when bottled water was found to be contaminated.

For example, in 1990, Perrier, a leading bottled water brand, was found to contain excessive levels of benzene, a flammable toxic liquid, sometimes used as a motor fuel. At first Perrier denied the charge but ultimately recalled millions of bottles of the water.

There have been many other cases when bottles have been recalled. Gleick writes, "The full list of recalls of contaminated bottled water includes a remarkable list of contaminants.

"In addition to benzene, bottles have been found to contain mold, sodium hydroxide, kerosene, styrene, yeast, tetrahydrofuran, sand, fecal coliforms and other forms of bacteria, elevated chlorine, 'filth,' glass particles, sanitizer and, in my favorite example, crickets."

None of these contaminants would be found if the bottled water companies were subject to the same kind of inspection as public water systems.

Producing bottled water causes two other problems. One is the cost of materials, production and transportation, especially for companies that ship their products throughout the country or world.

The other problem is the environmental consequences of disposing of the huge volume of plastic waste. At least three-quarters of the used bottles are thrown out and wind up in one of the nation's landfills. Plastic doesn't degrade, so the bottles will be there forever.

The only realistic solution is to improve and expand the nation's community water supply systems. They can be supervised so that the water is pure and can be expanded as needed at public expense.

Taking this course will avoid the problems of drinking contaminated water and disposing of mountains of discarded plastic.

Congress can point the nation in that direction by requiring strict federal regulation of the bottled water industry.