Bottled water

This story is typical of what happens when you test bottled water against tap water Is it cleaner? Sometimes. Sometimes not. In many ways, bottled water is less regulated than tap Is it tastier? In taste tests across the country people consistently choose tap over bottled water Bottled water costs over 2000 times more than tap water Can you imagine paying 2000 times the price of anything else? How about a $10,000 sandwich? Yet, people in the US buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week That is enough to circle the globe more than 5 times How did this come to be? Well it all goes back to how our materials' economy works and one of its key drivers, which is known as manufactured demand. If companies wanna keep growing they have to keep selling more and more stuff In the 1979's giant soft drink companies got worried as they saw their growth projection starting to level off. Well, the companies found their next big idea in a silly designer product that most people laughed at as a passing yuppie fad "Water is free", people said back then What will they sell us next? Air? So how do you get people to buy this fringe product? Simple! You manufacture demand. How do you do that? Well, imagine you are in charge of a bottled water company since people are not lining up to trade their hard earned money for your unnecessary product you make them fee scared and insecure if they don't have it and that's exactly what the bottled water industry did One of the 1st marketing tactics was to scare people about tap water with adds like Fiji's Cleveland campaign. Next, you hide the reality of your product behind images of pure fantasy Have you ever notice how bottled water tries to seduce us with pictures of mountain streams and pristine nature? But guess where a third of all bottled water in the US actually comes from. The tap! Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani are two of the many brands that are really filtering tap water The problem strikes here with extraction and production where oil is used to make bottled water Each year, making the plastic water bottles used in the US takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars all that energy spent to make the bottle even more to ship it around the planet and then we drink it in about ... 2 minutes? That brings us to the big problem at the other end of the life cycle Disposal What happens to all this bottles when we're done? 80% end up in landfills where they will sit for thousands of years or in incinerators where they are burnt releasing toxic pollution. The rest gets collected for recycling. I was curious about where the plastic bottles that I put in the recycling bins go. I found out that shiploads were being sent to India So I went there. I will never forget riding over a hill outside Madras where I came face to face with a mountain of plastic bottles from California. Real recycling would turn these bottles back into bottles. But that wasn't what was happening here. Instead this bottles were slated to be downcycled, which means turning them into lower quality products that would just be chucked later. The parts that couldn't be downcycled were thrown away there. Shipped all the way to India just to be dumped in someone else's backyard. If bottled water companies want to use mountains in their labels it would be more accurate to show one of those mountains of plastic waste. This strategies are all core parts of manufacturing demand. Once they've manufactured all this demand, creating a multi-billion dollar market, they defend it by beating out the competition. But in this case, the competition is our basic Human Right to clean, safe, drinking water. Pepsi's based German publicly said: They want us to think is dirty and bottled water is the best alternative. In many places public water is polluted thanks to polluting industries like... the plastic bottle industry. And these bottled water guys are all too happy to offer their expensive solutions which keep us hooked on their products. It is time we took back the tap.