Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [64]
Conscientious Canadians can buy Earth Water, which comes from the city of Edmonton’s municipal supply, and support the United Nations’ water work. In the eastern United States there’s Keeper Springs, founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chris Bartle, a sustainable-business entrepreneur. Keeper Springs is bottled in Vermont, has minuscule distribution in New York and New England, and funnels all its after-tax profits to the Waterkeeper Alliance. (There aren’t many: in 2006, the company sold only 130,000 cases of water—about 55,000 less than what Poland Spring’s Hollis plant produces in a day.)
Why, I ask Bartle, would a group focused on protecting public waterways and municipal supplies promote the purchase of private water? “I want to put it right up there on the Web site,” Bartle says. “ ‘We advise you not to buy our product. We advise you to drink tap water.’ ” But he doesn’t think the convenience-minded public will listen. (After our talk, the Web site changes to reflect his pro-tap ideas.) Bartle’s point: if you must buy bottled water, buy ours. At least it will do some good.
That’s what all the ethical waterists say.
In Britain, the socially conscious can buy Thirsty Planet or Belu, which funnel money through water charities to Africa. Both companies trade on awareness of water equity, but Belu scores some environmental points too. The company uses wind energy, offsets its carbon dioxide emissions by funding clean-energy projects, and uses bottles made, in the United States, of corn.
(A few words about corn plastic: its manufacture generates fewer greenhouse gases than plastic made from oil, and yes, corn is a renewable, instead of a fossil, resource. But corn is hardly sustainable, not the way it’s grown in this country. Farmed at an industrial scale, corn requires vast amounts of herbicides and fertilizer. With heavy rain, these inputs run into waterways and pollute drinking water. Corn plastic is compostable, but only in a commercial operation: very few backyard bins or piles get hot enough for degradation to take place in a reasonable amount of time. If your community doesn’t collect materials for composting, your bottle will likely end up in a landfill. Recyclers don’t like corn plastic either: it doesn’t mix well with the conventional stuff. Processors have to pay to sort it out, then pay again to dispose of it.)
Ethical waters make consumers feel good about buying bottled water, but they have some insidious side effects. They undermine confidence in tap water, which may erode public support that’s crucial for its upkeep and improvement; they do nothing to solve the problems that spur consumers to buy bottled water in the first place; they perpetuate the idea that water is a commodity; and they subtly make us forget that Starbucks, or any other food-service establishment, has a perfectly good spigot behind its counter.
But what if the water or pipes aren’t perfectly good? There’s a market opportunity here as well: the water filter, a natural middle ground in the battle between the bottle and the tap. By 2007, approximately 60 percent of U.S. households had some kind of water filtration system, up from 40 percent in 2000. Ads for refrigerators promote their built-in filters, and under-the-sink devices are suddenly part of real-estate advertising, one of the essential “mod cons.” The U.S. market for residential water treatment was estimated, in 2006, to be worth $1.5 billion, and it’s growing at an annual rate of between 9 and 11 percent.
I’m doing my part: I’ve got the Brita UltraMax perched