‘Bottled and Sold’
MNN: What made you want to write aboutbottled water?
Gleick: I’ve been working on water issues for about 30 years, but my interest in bottled water has grown in the last several years alongside the growth of the bottled water industry itself. As sales of bottled water have exploded, the controversies over bottled water have also grown. Fiji water in particular is in many ways emblematic of the problems with bottled water: the high cost of production and transportation, and the advertising that’s required to sell it. It’s such a strange idea that it could possibly be an appropriate thing to do — to bottle water in Fiji and transport it all the way to the U.S. to be bought and sold. It’s an extreme example of the lengths we’ll go just to bring a product to the American consumer.
Bottled water has gotten a lot of flack for its environmental cost, but aren’t the plastic bottles recyclable?
PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) is 100 percent recyclable, as the bottled water industry tells us over and over again. But recyclable is not the same as recycled. In the U.S. about 75 percent of plastic bottles are tossed in the landfill. And most of the stuff that’s recycled doesn’t get made into new plastic bottles. Instead, it’s shipped to China where it’s downcycled into secondary plastic materials like fiber filling. There’s a value to that, but there’s no reason why all of our PET bottles couldn’t be made from recycled PET. The technology exists. It’s a little more costly for the bottled water companies, but it would be less costly for the environment.
How do we get people to start drinking less bottled water?
We’re not going to get rid of bottled water entirely. It’s a commodity, and if people really want to buy it, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be allowed to. But, we ought to really look at why people buy bottled water. One reason is because, rightly or wrongly, people fear our tap water. In general our tap water systems are good, but I also believe very strongly that they ought to be better. But the first line of defense against bad tap water systems isn’t bottled water, it’s making our tap water systems better and making sure the public has confidence in them. The second reason people buy bottled water is because it’s available everywhere, while public water fountains are becoming increasingly harder to find. Third, some people simply don’t like the taste of their tap water. And finally, advertising and marketing play a big role. Often-deceptive advertising convinces us that bottled water is going to make us healthier, skinnier, smarter, sexier … even holier. We need to tackle all of these issues if we’re really interested in reducing bottled water consumption.
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/bottled-and-sold
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