Message in a Bottle: Charles Fishman on Bottled Water
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 07. 4.07
Notwithstanding Jeremy's post, TreeHugger usually doesn't like bottled water no matter how is is wrapped. (see it all in How to Green Your Water.) Now Charles Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect, looks at bottled water in the July issue of Fast Company. There is little here that has not been on TreeHugger before, but he is such a good writer and puts it all together so coherently.
A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it's just a bottle of water--modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don't need--when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation--it's worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is.
Fishman covers all of the issues: the fuel used for transport, the markups, the marketing, the hype. And, the convenience and the incredible wealth of the Western world that can support such a frivolity.
Bottled water is not a sin. But it is a choice.Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the car cup holders--that happens because of a fundamental thoughtlessness. It's only marginally more trouble to have reusable water bottles, cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the fridge. We just can't be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that conspicuous consumption of bottled water that we don't need seems wasteful, and perhaps cavalier.
Must reading from a great writer at ::Fast Company
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Convenient, Tasty, Healthy Water is Only a Tap Away
- A Green Bath Soothes Your Aching Bones and Saves Water Too
- French Pressed Coffee: A Surprisingly Green Luxury, On the Cheap
- Got Guts? Stand Up to Summer Heat Without Air Conditioning
- Green Glossary: Nature Deficit Disorder
- How Artificial Sweeteners Are Polluting Our Water
Hi all,
I agree: tab water is much more environmentally conscious and therefore better than bottled water.
But demonizing bottled water doesnt help and is in my eyes hipocritical.
The symbol of (american) consumerism is not a bottle of Evian( Fiji, Perrier whatever), but a 2 liter bottle of diet pepsi.
As stated above this is a matter of choice. Lets have an example:
Person A drinks tab water all the time at home (luckily living in Sydney which has nice tab water:)) and once a week when he's out for dinner loves to drink a nice bottle of San Pellegrino to accompany his food. (And Yes he can taste the difference!)
Person B drinks 2-3 liters of diet coke every day, and as he by chance is in the same restaurant that very day, drinks a glass of local orange juice.
Obviously, he scowls at Person A, cos he learned at TH that bottled water from faraway places is really, really bad.
Not to state the obvious, but in Australia the environmental cost in water and fuel usage might even be higher for the local, conventional orange juice than for the imported water. And by all means whether an orance juice is more worthy of the environmental impact than a San Pellegrino is everybodies own choice and NOT for us to decide.
IMO there are 3 things to be learned:
1) Only solution is a worldwide carbon credit trade, as the bad thing is the fuel and resource use and not the bottled water per se. That would also be the easiest to implement, instead of having a moral argument for everything, whether its ok to consume or not.
2) Transparency would be important to make those choices easier and more real for everybody. Each product should have a carbon and resource footprint as they now have calories and ingredients.
Everybody who really wants to help the environment should tirelessly lobby for those two things, and not waste precious energy on scaring off people, who might after all we know have even less total carbon footprint than the one who is throwing mud.
Cheers to all THs!!
Very interesting article, I hate the whole notion of bottled water. It's worse in the US, probably because it is cheaper to buy. Regardless of the effect on the environment I don't buy bottled water because I just see it as a waste of money. Water comes out of my tap for free at home, why would I pay to have it come out of bottles?! If people are bothered abut purity (which isn't a problem at all here in the UK) then get a Britta filter and then you can also keep it int he fridge so it stays chilled. A few days ago I forgot to bring any water with me on my commute, and a small bottle on the train was £1.10 (over 2 dollars) but I made sure I brought the bottle home with me to reuse so it wasn't a complete waste of money.
Wonderful recap about the unnecessary use of bottled water--it drives me crazy! I live in the DC Metro area and am constantly disgusted by the overflowing trashcans filled with plastic bottles! It's such a waste and just as easy to find a great reusable bottle that can fit in anything you need to carry. I have a great one with a hook that I carry solo wherever I go.
Keep up the good work!
I can imagine it now: years into the future, people are seriously concerned about the quality of their air. Rather than lobby the government to clean up the air, or wearing a mask to filter the air, they take to carrying small plastic bottles of oxygen. Of course, carrying around enough oxygen for the whole day would put a serious strain on their atrophied bodies, and who can be bothered with the hassle of refilling a tank? Businessmen see an opportunity, and start selling oxygen in smaller and smaller containers, at prices that no middle-class citizen can call expensive. Eventually, the bottled oxygen becomes ubiquitous, and breathing normal air is seen as disgusting, with mothers scolding their children for going outside without their oxygen...
you get the point.
I think this whole bottled water use should be applied to any bottled beverage, specially if they are packaged in a plastic bottle. This has a lot to do with the fact that the raw material used for plastic is OIL.
So, if anything, reducing the amount of bottled beverages consumed, especially plastic like mentioned before, will decrease the amount of OIL extracted and the energy required to create the plastic bottles, and even to recycle them.
Comparing glass and plastic, glass bottles are much better, since glass recycling requires less energy use than recycling plastic. But again no disposable bottles is best than anything.
Reduce and reuse are the 2R's that have less environmental impact and it is the best way to reduce waste and energy use.