Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [67]
But is it fashion or is it a rising awareness of the bottle’s environmental toll that’s driving the backlash? I’m starting to think they’re the same thing. Fashion drove a certain segment of society to embrace bottled water in the first place, and fashion (green chic, that is) may drive that same segment to reject it. But the imperative to stop global warming—the biggest reason for the backlash—reaches only so far. For some, the imperative to protect oneself from tap water that either tastes bad or is bad, or the simple allure of convenience, may trump any planetary concerns.
The International Bottled Water Association is counting on it. Now in panic mode, the group is deflecting critics left and right. Bottled water uses only 0.02 percent of the world’s groundwater, Joseph Doss, the group’s president, argues in fullpage advertisements and in interviews with the media. (Yes, but it takes all those gallons from just a few places.) Other beverages move around the country, and the world, too: it’s unfair to single out bottled water for opprobrium. (True: only about 10 percent of bottled water, by volume, is imported in the United States, compared with 25 to 30 percent of wine. But we don’t drink twenty-eight gallons of wine per person per year, and wine doesn’t, alas, flow from our taps.)
Bottled water is a healthy alternative to high-calorie drinks, says the IBWA: it competes with soda, not tap. “Any efforts to discourage water consumption are not in the public’s interest,” Doss says. (What a difference seven years make: in 2000, Robert S. Morrison, then CEO of Quaker Oats, soon to merge with PepsiCo, told a reporter, “The biggest enemy is tap water.” And Susan D. Wellington, vice president of marketing for Gatorade, owned by Pepsi, said to a group of New York analysts, “When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.” In 2006, Fiji Water took that dig at Cleveland, with its “The Label Says Fiji Because It’s Not Bottled in Cleveland” ad.)
Since Americans still drink almost twice as much soda as bottled water, it’s not surprising that Coca-Cola, owner of Vitaminwater, and PepsiCo are covering all their bases. The companies now offer vitamin-fortified sodas, extending what Michael Pollan calls “the Wonder bread strategy of supplementation to junk food in its purest form.”
The bottling industry also plays the emergency card: consumers should consider bottled water when tap isn’t an option. When the pipes break and pumps fail, of course, but also when you are, well, thirsty. “It’s not so easy, walking down Third Avenue on a hot day, to get a glass of tap water,” John D. Sicher Jr., editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, a trade publication, says. And, yes, all those PET bottles, which use about 40 percent less resin now than they did five years ago, really should be recycled, the bottlers all cry. (“Our vision is to no longer have our packaging viewed as waste but as a resource for future use,” Scott Vitters, Coke’s director of sustainable packaging, says.)
But please, don’t insist that we rely on recycled content, is the bottlers’ unspoken message, and let’s collect the empties not through container deposit laws, which are funded by the beverage industry, but through beefed-up curbside or drop-off programs, which have, so far, been funded by taxpayers.
Finally, there’s the “Americans deserve a choice” argument, offered by manufacturers whenever products with high social or environmental costs are challenged. It sounds patriotic, it promotes individualism, and it deflects responsibility from producers. If drinking bottled water, like smoking cigarettes and driving SUVs, is an individual choice, then manufacturers can’t be blamed for any negative impacts, whether high cancer rates or oil wars.
Are environmental activists making too much of bottled water’s externalities? Surely