Last year, Americans drank more than 10 billion gallons of bottled water. Wildlife and the environment paid.
By Tara Lohan
This spring, as California withered in its fourth year of drought and
mandatory water restrictions were enacted for the first time in the state’s history, a
news story
broke revealing that Nestlé Waters North America was tapping springs in
the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California using a
permit that expired 27 years ago.
And when the company’s CEO Tim Brown was
asked
on a radio program if Nestlé would stop bottling water in the Golden
State, he replied, “Absolutely not. In fact, if I could increase it, I
would.”
That’s because bottled water is big business, even in a country
where most people have clean, safe tap water readily and cheaply
available. (Although it should be noted that Starbucks agreed to
stop sourcing and manufacturing their Ethos brand water in California after being drought-shamed.)
Profits made by the industry are much to the chagrin of nonprofits like
Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a corporate watchdog, and
Food and Water Watch
(FWW), a consumer advocacy group, both of which have waged campaigns
against the bottled water industry for years. But representatives from
both organizations say they’ve won key fights against the industry in
the last 10 years and have helped shift people’s consciousness on the
issue.
A Battle of Numbers
In 2014 bottled water companies spent more than
$84 million on advertising
to compete with each other and to convince consumers that bottled water
is healthier than soda and safer than tap. And it seems to be paying
off: Americans have an increasing love of bottled water, particularly
those half-liter-sized single-use bottles that are ubiquitous at every
check-out stand and in every vending machine. According to
Beverage Marketing Corporation
(BMC), a data and consulting firm, in the last 14 years consumption of
bottled water in the U.S. has risen steadily, with the only exception
being a quick dip during the 2008-2009 recession.
In
2000, Americans each drank an average of 23 gallons of bottled water.
By 2014, that number hit 34 gallons a person. That translates to 10.7
billion gallons for the U.S. market and sales of $13 billion last year.
At the same time, consumption of soda is falling, and by 2017, bottled
water sales may surpass that of soda for the first time.
But there is also indication that more eco-conscious consumers are carrying reusable bottles to refill with tap. A
Harris poll
in 2010 found that 23 percent of respondents switched from bottled
water to tap (the number was slightly higher during 2009 recession).
Reusable bottles are now chic and available in
myriad designs and styles. And a Wall Street Journal
story
tracked recent acquisitions in the reusable bottle industry that
indicate big growth as well, although probably not enough to make a dent
in the earnings of bottling giants like Nestlé, Coke and Pepsi.
Why the Fight Over Bottled Water
“The
single most important factor in the growth of bottled water is
heightened consumer demand for healthier refreshment,” says BMC’s
managing director of research Gary A. Hemphill. “Convenience of the
packaging and aggressive pricing have been contributing factors.”
That convenience, though, comes with an environmental cost. The
Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization, found that it took the equivalent of
17 million barrels
of oil to make all the plastic water bottles that thirsty Americans
drank in 2006 — enough to keep a million cars chugging along the roads
for a year. And this is only the energy to make the bottles, not the
energy it takes to get them to the store, keep them cold or ship the
empties off to recycling plants or landfills.
Of the billions of
plastic water bottles sold each year, the majority don’t end up being
recycled. Those single-serving bottles, also known as PET (polyethylene
terephthalate) bottles because of the kind of resin they’re made with,
are
recycled at a rate of about 31 percent in the U.S. The other 69 percent end up in landfills or as litter.
And
while recycling them is definitely a better option than throwing them
away, it comes with a cost, too. Stiv Wilson, director of campaigns at
the
Story of Stuff Project,
says that most PET bottles that are recycled end up, not as new plastic
bottles, but as textiles, such as clothing. And when you wash synthetic
clothing, micro-plastics end up going down the drain and back into
waterways. These tiny plastic fragments are dangerous for wildlife,
especially in oceans.
“If you start out with a bad material to
begin with, recycling it is going to be an equally bad material,” says
Wilson. “You’re changing its shape but its environmental implications
are the same.” PET bottles are part of a growing epidemic of plastic
waste that’s projected to get worse. A
recent study found that by 2050, 99 percent of seabirds will be ingesting plastic.
Ingesting plastic trash is deadly for seabirds, like this unfortunate albatross. (image: USFWS)
“We
notice in all the data that the amount of plastic in the environment is
growing exponentially,” says Wilson. “We are exporting it to places
that can’t deal with it, we’re burning it with dioxins going into the
air. The whole chain of custody is bad for the environment, for animals
and the humans that deal with it. The more you produce, the worse it
gets. The problem grows.”
Even on land, plastic water bottles are a
problem — and in some of our most beautiful natural areas, as a recent
controversy over bottled water in National Parks has shown. According to
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), more than
20 national parks
have banned the sale of plastic water bottles, reporting that plastic
bottles average almost one third of the solid waste that parks must pay
(with taxpayer money) to have removed.
After Zion National Park in Utah banned the sale of plastic water bottles, the park saw sales of reusable bottles jump
78 percent
and kept it 60,000 bottles (or 5,000 pounds of plastic) a year out of
the waste stream. The park also made a concerted effort to provide
bottle refilling stations across the park so there would be ample
opportunity to refill reusable bottles.
There might be more parks
with bans but 200 water bottlers backed by the International Bottled
Water Association have fought back to oppose measures by parks to cut
down on the sale of disposable plastic water bottles. The group was not
too happy when National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis wrote that
parks “must be a visible exemplar of sustainability,” and said in 2011
that the more than 400 hundreds entities in the National Park Service
could ban the sale of plastic bottles if they meet strict requirements
for making drinking water available to visitors.
Water
bottle filling stations at Grand Canyon National Park provide free
spring water from the park's approved water supply located at Roaring
Springs. (image: Michael Quinn/National Park Service/Flickr CC)
Park
officials contend that trashcans are overflowing with bottles in some
parks. The bottling industry counters that people are more apt to choose
sugary drinks, like soda, if they don’t have access to bottled water.
The bottled water industry alliance used its Washington muscle to add a
rider to an appropriations bill in July that would have
stopped parks
from restricting bottled water sales. The bill didn’t pass for other
reasons, but it’s likely not the last time the rider will surface in
legislation.
Changing Tide
Bottlers may be
making big money, but activists have also notched their own share of
wins. “When we first started, really no one was out there challenging
the misleading marketing that the bottled water industry was giving the
public,” said John Stewart, deputy campaign director at CAI, which first
began campaigning against bottled water in 2004. “You had no
information available to consumers about the sources of bottling and you
had communities whose water supplies were being threatened by companies
like Nestlé with total impunity.”
If you buy the marketing, then
it would appear that most bottled water comes from pristine mountain
springs beside snow-capped peaks. But in reality, about half of all
bottled water, including Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, come
from municipal sources that are then purified or treated in some way.
Activists fought to have companies label the source of its water and
they succeeded with two of the top three — Pepsi and Nestlé. “We also
garnered national media stories that put a spotlight on the fact that
bottling corporations were taking our tap water and selling it back to
us at thousands of times the price,” said Stewart. “People finally began
to see they were getting duped.”
When companies aren’t bottling
from municipal sources, the water is mostly spring water tapped from
wilderness areas, like Nestlé bottling in the San Bernardino National
Forest, or rural communities. Some communities concerned about
industrial withdrawals of groundwater have fought back against spring
water bottlers — the biggest being Nestlé, which owns dozens of regional
brands like Arrowhead, Calistoga, Deer Park, Ice Mountain and Poland
Spring. Coalitions have helped back communities in victories in
Maine,
Michigan and
California (among other areas) in fights against Nestlé.
One the biggest was in
McCloud, California,
which sits in the shadow of snowy Mount Shasta, and actually looks like
the label on so many bottles. Residents of McCloud fought for six years
against Nestlé’s plan for a water bottling facility that first intended
to draw 200 million gallons of water a year from a local spring. Nestlé
finally scrapped its plans and left town, but ended up heading 200
miles down the road to the city of Sacramento, where it got a
sweetheart deal on the city’s municipal water supply.
CAI
and FWW have also worked with college students. Close to a hundred have
taken some action, says Stewart. “Not all the schools have been able to
ban the sale of bottled water on campus but we’ve come up with other
strategies like passing resolutions that student government funds can’t
be used to purchase bottled water or increasing the availability of tap
water on campus or helping to get water fountains retrofitted so you can
refill your reusable bottle,” says Emily Wurth, FWW’s water program
director.
In
just six months, Lake Mead National Recreation Area visitors have kept
more than 13,600 water bottles out of landfills by using a new hydration
station. (image: National Park Service)
Changes
have also come at the municipal level. In 2007, San Francisco led the
charge by prohibiting the city from spending money on bottled water for
its offices. At the 2010 Conference of Mayors, 72 percent of mayors said
they have considered “eliminating or reducing bottled water purchases
within city facilities” and nine mayors had already adopted a ban
proposal. In 2015, San Francisco passed a law (to be phased in over four
years) that will ban the sale of bottled water on city property.
These
victories, say activists, are part of a much bigger fight — larger than
the bottled water industry itself. “We are shifting to fight the
wholesale privatization of water a little more,” says Stewart. He says
supporters who have joined coalitions to fight bottled water “deeply
understand the problematic nature of water for profit and the
co-modification of water” that transcends from bottled water to private
control of municipal power and sewer systems.
Currently the vast
majority (90 percent) of water systems in the U.S. are publicly run,
but cash-strapped cities and towns are also targets of multinational
water companies, says Stewart. The situation is made more dire by
massive shortfalls in federal funding that used to help support
municipal water and now is usually cut during federal budget crunches.
“Cities
are so desperate that they don’t think about long-term implications of
job cuts, rate hikes, loss of control over the quality of the water and
any kind of accountability when it comes to how the system is managed,”
says Stewart. “We need to turn all eyes to our public water systems and
aging infrastructure and our public services in general that are
threatened by privatization.”
