The bottled water dilemma

We’ve written about bottled water before, but it wasn’t until I read this article in Fast Company about the bottled water industry that I decided it was about time to boycott drinking bottled water.

OK, boycott is a strong word—perhaps “strongly avoid” is a better word choice. After all, when faced with the choice of yet another corn syrup beverage and bottled water, I typically choose the latter. And I’m not against water—I’m just against the notion of Coca-Cola or PepsiCo bottling tap water and selling it to me at a ridiculous price. (Yes, Dasani and Aquafina are bottles of local tap water that have been run through a reverse osmosis process to produce same-tasting water across the US, regardless of where the tap water is bottled.)

What irks me the most is that we don’t blink at the $1.35 or whatever we’re charged for a bottle of water. I didn’t think twice about it myself until reading Message in a Bottle, which points out the following:

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.

Now I get a feeling of nausea whenever I step into a convenience store and see all those bottles of Aquafina on the cooler shelves. Partly because I feel offended that I’m being so brazenly marketed to (buy tap water at 1000x the price you normally pay), and partly because it seems like a perfect example of a situation in which people can make an ecological difference just by making a simple choice.

As the article says in closing:

Once you understand the resources mustered to deliver the bottle of water, it’s reasonable to ask as you reach for the next bottle, not just “Does the value to me equal the 99 cents I’m about to spend?” but “Does the value equal the impact I’m about to leave behind?”

And, to be fair, there are some economic and social benefits to, say, Fiji water coming from Fiji: clean drinking water for a portion of the population on Fiji and jobs, to name two. The flip side of that reality is that every bottle used to package Fiji water must be shipped empty to Fiji and then shipped back full to its ultimate destination.

One part of the article involving Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is worth quoting at length:

As for the energy used to transport water from overseas, Mackey says it is no more or less wasteful than the energy used to bring merlot from France or coffee from Ethiopia, raspberries from Chile or iPods from China. “Have we now decided that the use of any fossil fuel is somehow unethical?” Mackey asks. “I don’t think water should be picked on. Why is the iPod okay and the water is not?”

Mackey’s is a merchant’s approach to the issue of bottled water—it’s a choice for people to make in the market. Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer takes an ethicist’s approach. Singer has coauthored two books that grapple specifically with the question of what it means to eat ethically—how responsible are we for the negative impact, even unknowing, of our food choices on the world?

“Where the drinking water is safe, bottled water is simply a superfluous luxury that we should do without,” he says. “How is it different than French merlot? One difference is the value of the product, in comparison to the value of transporting and packaging it. It’s far lower in the bottled water than in the wine.

“And buying the merlot may help sustain a tradition in the French countryside that we value—a community, a way of life, a set of values that would disappear if we stopped buying French wines. I doubt if you travel to Fiji you would find a tradition of cultivation of Fiji water.

“We’re completely thoughtless about handing out $1 for this bottle of water, when there are virtually identical alternatives for free. It’s a level of affluence that we just take for granted. What could you do? Put that dollar in a jar on the counter instead, carry a water bottle, and at the end of the month, send all the money to Oxfam or CARE and help someone who has real needs. And you’re no worse off.”

The New York Times has also written about bottled water (Water, Water Everywhere, but Guilt by the Bottleful) and The Age (The real cost of bottled water) estimates that:

“Drinking water in Melbourne or Sydney costs around $1.20 a tonne,” says Mr Kiernan. “Australian bottled water costs around $3000 a tonne. And Italian bottled water? About $9000 a tonne.”

Some of the maths behind those numbers are at the bottom of the article