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By Root 766 0

“purified bottled water that comes from public drinking water systems is a higher quality” than tap; “bottled water has a better safety record” than tap; and “tap water has more documented health-related incidents.” It’s difficult to know if the first two statements are true, since bottlers aren’t required to publicize their test results. Independent testing has found many of the same contaminants in bottled water that are sometimes found in tap water—sometimes within safe levels and sometimes above. The third statement may literally be true, but since Americans consume vastly more tap water than bottled, and tap water is far more frequently tested, it’s about as meaningful as saying more people die in car accidents than in motorcycle accidents.

Taking criticism of its environmental impact to heart, Nestlé Waters released in late 2008 its first ever Corporate Citizenship report, which touts its LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) bottling plants, its (unspecified) efforts to increase PET recycling rates, and its ever-shrinking plastic, water, and energy footprints. (Its per-unit footprint, that is: The more product Nestlé Waters sells, obviously, the more plastic, water, and energy it consumes.) The company says it’s working to double recycling rates for plastic beverage bottles to 60 percent or more by 2018. PepsiCo light-weighted its Aquafina bottles for the second time and began to blow and fill them at the same plant, to cut energy use and shipping costs. Coca-Cola announced plans to become “the most efficient company in the world in terms of water use in the beverage industry,” with a goal of improving water efficiency 20 percent by 2012 as compared to its use in 2004, and eventually becoming “water neutral,” though it specifies no deadline for this ill-defined feat. Coke opened the world’s largest plastic-bottle recycling plant in early 2009 and says it will use between 5 and 10 percent of that content in its water and soda bottles. The message to consumers is that they can drink this product without guilt if only they recycle their packaging.

As pressure groups chipped away at bottled water’s popularity, bottlers resolutely underscored the healthful nature of their product, emphasizing anew that it can help defeat obesity and diabetes. On Spanish-language TV stations in the U.S., Nestlé—which unlike Coke and Pepsi doesn’t make soda—ran ads in which children cavort in a swimming pool while a voice-over says, “Kids don’t jump in pools of high-fructose corn syrup.” In the U.K., Nestlé, Danone, and Highland Spring—Britain’s three biggest bottled-water companies—formed a lobby group, the Natural Hydration Council, to “research and promote the environmental, health and other sustainable benefits of natural bottled water.” The group plans to revive the “eight glasses a day” campaign, according to its manager, and promote “sugar-free hydration.”

Today, no mainstream attack on bottled water goes unanswered. If such criticisms were once perceived by the industry as merely annoying, they now demand professionally crafted responses. Fiji Water, the number-two imported brand in the U.S., launched a website, FIJIGreen.com, to publicize its righteous acts of carbon shrinkage. Nestlé spokespeople routinely craft op-eds and letters to editors in defense of their product. Taking umbrage at Irena Salina’s 2008 documentary FLOW: For Love of Water, which accuses Nestlé of harming two lakes, a stream and wetlands in Mecosta County, Michigan, the company produced its own six-minute film, in addition to a three-page printed response. Nestlé claims its operations haven’t negatively impacted water resources and ecosystems; Nestlé opponents claim that if this is true today (a point the opponents don’t concede), it’s only because Michigan courts ordered the company to reduce its pumping. As Tom Chandler wrote on his website, StopNestleWaters.org, “That’s a case of doing the wrong thing, fighting to keep doing it, being forced to do the right thing, then crowing about it.”

The war between tap and bottle took a