Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [15]
When I pick her up that afternoon, Lucy digs into her backpack and pulls out a one-line note from her teacher: “Lucy’s water turned red today.” Curses! Lucy explains, “I dripped some water on my desk and Ms. Barbara saw it and she told me to dump it out.” I’m crushed. What are the odds Lucy would drip water today, and that her teacher would even notice? Now, not only can’t I repeat the experiment (the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, I tell Lucy), but her teacher thinks I’m nuts.
My next step is to buy a urine specific-gravity test, but before I can get to the drugstore, Lucy and I visit her pediatrician for a routine checkup. He glances at her tongue and says she’s fine. But he has his doubts about me.
In 1994, Pepsi introduced its own water, called Aquafina, to the packaged-beverage market, and in 1999 Coke came out with Dasani. Both companies had taken some hits for pushing sugary, fattening drinks on kids and adults: getting into water was their way of maintaining their share of the lucrative beverage market. (More recently, these megacompanies have been buying up smaller beverage companies that make water and energy drinks; in 2007, Anheuser-Busch bought the right to distribute Icelandic Glacial water in the States, and Coca-Cola paid $4.1 billion for Glacéau. Obviously, they think the market for water is strong.)
Both Coke and Pepsi draw water from municipal sources—from city pipes in such places as Detroit, Wichita, Fresno, New York City, and Jacksonville—then filter the bejesus out of it (using a series of membranes and carbon filters) and sterilize it (with ultraviolet light and ozonation). Dasani adds back minerals, to give the water some body, and salts, for taste (just like fast food). Aquafina bottles its distilled water neat. For these brands, choosing a location with good infrastructure—a plant, access to large markets—is far more important than the quality of the water they start with.
In 2006, 44 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States came from municipal supplies and was labeled either drinking water or purified water. Every time I hear someone crow that Aquafina or Dasani is “just tap,” that consumers are being ripped off, I want to shake him or her. I feel funny defending the multinational corporations, with their misleading marketing and high prices, but those brands, being filtered to the nth degree, are nothing like the stuff that flows from municipal pipes and out through kitchen faucets.
Taking advantage of their vast networks of soda-bottling plants, Coke and Pepsi can bottle water relatively close to where it is sold, which means it costs less to put Dasani and Aquafina on a grocery shelf than it does, say, a bottle of Poland Spring, which has to be shipped from Maine. (Nor do Coke and Pepsi have to spend money collecting data from monitoring wells, protecting the virginality of their sources, or battling community opponents.) To compete with Coke and Pepsi, bottlers of springwater have to sell more product, and that means spending more on advertising.
In 2005, the bottled-water industry spent $158 million on advertising in the United States. If you’re wondering why bottled tap water costs so much, here’s one answer. In 2006, Pepsi spent more than $20 million on its “drink more water” campaign, which suggested that Aquafina would make those who drank it look and feel better. (According