Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [65]
Things are about to look even better for Brita (named after the German inventor’s daughter). The bottle backlash, coupled with not-so-latent fears about what lurks in house hold pipes, gives the company a substantial bump. “The criticism has been good for business,” Drew McGowan, a company spokesperson, tells me. Sales jump 11 percent in a single quarter. “Why should we waste money on bottled water? Tap is pretty good.”
I remind McGowan that as recently as 2006, Brita ran ads in Canada and, before that, in the United States that slammed municipal supplies. “Obviously, that’s not our marketing direction now,” he says.
Brita’s marketing direction now closely echoes that of bottled water, with an emphasis on health and wellness, for which the universal shorthand seems to be a beautiful woman in a yoga pose. Drink enough water, says Brita’s Web site, and you’ll take fewer trips to the dentist, your skin will glow, and you’ll sleep better.
A week after I talk to McGowan, Brita develops an ethical component: buy one of their pitchers plus a Nalgene, and the companies will send some of the proceeds to the Blue Planet Run Foundation. It’s a perfect lesson in capitalism: smart marketing persuaded us to buy bottled water in the first place; now that bottled water is a problem, smart marketing tells us to solve it by buying something else.
I did: I got those Siggs. So do many others. Between May and August, the Swiss company’s sales shoot up 200 percent. Sigg’s U.S. president, Steve Wasik, says the bottles—now in groovy patterns with slogans like “make love not landfill”—“are an accessory like your cell phone or your iPod.”
The analogy makes perfect sense from a marketing point of view, but buying a refillable bottle is opposite to the hyperindividualism of buying a private phone or musical headset. Refillables announce a commitment to public water, a heartening step away from what Andrew Szasz, in Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves, has called the inverted quarantine, in which Americans remove themselves from environmental problems by buying things (fallout shelters, homes in suburbs, organic food, bottled water) instead of working on solutions through political organizing. In the nineties, we started buying bottled water to protect ourselves from tap (and to distinguish ourselves from the masses). Now, thanks to rising eco-consciousness, a segment of society is going in the other direction. If buying something new—a filter or bottle—makes this more palatable to the consumption-addled populace, so be it.
Using a pour-through filter is ten to twenty times cheaper than buying bottled water. But what does it actually do? Sylvie Chavanne, Brita’s research-and-development group manager, explains that the filter contains charcoal, derived from either burnt coconut husks or coal, and ion-exchange beads, which are made of plastic resin, derived from oil.
“The charcoal pieces open and create pores,” she says. “They have sites to which molecules want to attach.” Molecules of chlorine, for example: Brita removes them all. Its ion-exchange beads are treated to bond with and reduce lead, foremost, followed by copper, cadmium, mercury, and benzene.
Chavanne stresses that a Brita improves drinking water—particularly its taste and odor—but it doesn’t deal with catastrophic situations. Does a Brita remove traces of pharmaceuticals? No, Chavanne says. Perchlorate? No. “We can’t claim to take it out if we don’t test for it, and we don’t test for it if the EPA doesn’t have a standard.”
What about disinfection by-products? “Only benzene is reduced with the pour-through filter, but the on-tap filter removes trihalomethanes and a long list of volatile organic compounds.” Phosphorus, nitrates, nitrogen?