The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [64]
Despite all of the conflicting studies and alarms, the truth is that in the United States, both tap water and bottled water are generally safe to drink. And that might be the most damning charge of all against bottled water, given the price difference between the two. On average, convenience-sized bottled water costs just over $2 per gallon, while tap water costs just one-or two-tenths of a cent per gallon—a difference of one thousand times. With statistics like these, it was only a matter of time, perhaps, before people began thinking what comedians from Dennis Miller to Janeane Garofalo have been telling us for years—that “Evian is just ‘naive’ spelled backward.”
Even as some newspaper stories questioning bottled water began to appear, however, the activists from CAI realized that none of the charges against bottled water would mean anything if they couldn’t address the issue of taste. The idea of the Tap Water Challenge grew out of a late-night brainstorming session in CAI’s Boston office in 2005, as the activists groped for a way to take the issue head-on. Not knowing what they’d find, they pitted the tap water in their office against bottles of Dasani and other brands; they were genuinely surprised to find that they couldn’t tell the difference.
In the early spring of 2006, CAI rolled out Tap Water Challenges in seven cities—including Boston, Austin, Minneapolis, and San Francisco—adding others every few weeks over the next six months. Everywhere they went, people were amazed to find they couldn’t distinguish between bottled and tap. Just as decades of advertising had convinced people they liked Coke Classic more than Pepsi or New Coke, it seemed the millions spent on branding bottled water had made people think it tasted fresher and purer than tap. And just like the Pepsi Challenge a generation earlier, the ready-made conflict of pitting two beverages against each other was irresistible to the media. Newspapers began running on-the-scene reports of die-hard Dasani or Aquafina drinkers chagrined to find they’d mistaken their favorites for Newark or Philadelphia tap water.
CAI’s Gigi Kellett, the national director of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, admits the group first chose cities they already knew had good water—including Boston and San Francisco, which pipe in water from reservoirs so pristine they don’t have to filter it. Soon, however, they realized they could hold them almost anywhere—even places such as South Florida that had a reputation for poor-tasting tap water. Oftentimes, the most skeptical taste-testers hadn’t tasted the water in years. When they held challenges in Miami—which sources its water from an underground aquifer before submitting it to a high-quality filtration and treatment system—they got the same results as anywhere else.
As awareness of the Tap Water Challenges spread, however, the activists found the issue that resonated most with consumers had less to do with the quality of the water, much less privatization and control of water resources. Instead, they were most concerned with the bottles themselves. In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore had just released the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, warning of the apocalyptic consequences of climate change and spurring consumers to measure their personal carbon footprints and carry canvas bags to the grocery store instead of wasting excess plastic. Likewise, there seemed something especially galling about wasting all of that plastic for a product that could just as easily be had from the tap. According to a 2009 report by the nonprofit Pacific Institute, it takes the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil to produce the plastic for all bottled water consumed