Bottled water
0 (0 Likes / 0 Dislikes)
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.