Bottled H2Uh-oh

“Message in a Bottle,” authored by Charles Fishman and published by Fast Company, is one of the most interesting business articles and social commentaries I have read.

Read the whole article. Forward it to your friends. Discuss over the dinner table. In the meantime, some noteworthy stats and quotes:

• The number-one selling item at Whole Foods, by unit, is bottled water.

• Americans spent more money on bottled water — $15 billion — last year than we did on iPods of movie tickets.

• “One out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water.”

• Re Fiji Water: “More than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.”

• Speaking of Fiji Water… Yes, it really comes from Fiji. Sounds nice. But then you realize that, “From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway. 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 trip is even longer. 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.”

• “We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 8 1/3 pounds a gallon. It’s so heavy you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water — you have to leave empty space.)” Note, “Pelligrino’s 1-liter glass bottles weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh, dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption.”

• Speaking of Pellegrino… For every one liter that goes into the fancy glass bottles for market, the Italian company “uses up 2 liters of water to prepare the bottles we buy” by washing and rinsing them in mineral water.

• “In 1976, the average American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water a year. Last year we drank 28.3 gallons of bottled water — 18 half-liter bottles a month. We drink more bottled water than milk, or coffee, or beer.”

• “If you break out the single-serve plastic bottle as its own category, our consumption of bottled water grew a thousand fold between 1984 and 2005.”

• “Americans went through 50 billion plastic bottles last year, 167 for each person. Our recycling rate for PET [the totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate plastic water bottles are made from] is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year — more than $1 billion worth of plastic.”

• “Bottled water isn’t healthier, or safer, than tap water [in the United States.]“

• You can buy a half-liter of Evian for $1.35 — 17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren’t paying attention. In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.”

• “Pepsi has the nation’s number-one-selling bottled water, Aquafina, with 13% of the market. Coke’s Dasani is number two, with 11% of the market. Both are simply purified municipal water — so 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi for our convenience. The water they are purifying is ready to drink — they are recleaning perfectly clean tap water.”

• Re the economics of the bottled water business: “Half the price of a typical $1.29 bottle foes to the retailer. As much as a third goes to the distributor and transport. Another 12 to 15 cents is the cost of the water itself, the bottle and the cap. That leaves roughly a dime for profit. On multipacks, that profit is more like 2 cents a bottle.”

So what does all of this mean? Americans like convenience and are willing to pay for something we can get for free — and that’s just as safe and healthy and good. Even if we fall victim to marketing and branding, so what? It’s our money, after all.

Certainly, “Bottled water is not a sin. But it is a choice… And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water…it’s fair to ask whether it’s always a good choice.”

And we should consider the environmental impact: manufacturing plastic bottles, shipping plastic bottles, industrializing the bottling process, transporting full bottles of water for market… Does the value of convenience — the ability to drop a buck or two for a plastic bottle of water — equal the impact we leave behind as a result of our conspicuous consumption?

Wandering and wondering,
J.R. Atwood