Waterlogged

"Bottlemania" author Elizabeth Royte explains how one of life's necessities became an extravagance, denounced by environmentalists and nuns alike.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Marketing, Environment, Pollution, Katharine Mieszkowski, Life, Salon Conversations, Environment & Science

June 7, 2008 |

Sparkling or still? Spring or tap? Imported or domestic? Flavored or plain? There's nothing simple about a drink of water, now that the bottled stuff outsells both milk and beer in the United States. In just a couple of decades, we've become a nation awash in bottled water -- with tens of billions of plastic empties to prove it -- transforming the drinking fountain on a city street into a dated curiosity akin to the public telephone booth.

How one of life's basic necessities became a heavily marketed beverage in a plastic bottle is the subject of Elizabeth Royte's new book "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It." Royte, an environmental journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., shares the many, sometimes bizarre, unintended consequences of cracking open that plastic seal.

Twenty years ago, "bottled" largely meant luxury imported from a remote spring (think Perrier); it was a sign of sophistication. Now, Coke and Pepsi sell the two most popular bottled waters in the country, Dasani and Aquafina, by simply filtering and bottling tap water. Between 1997 and 2006, sales in the United States of this newfangled beverage -- water! -- leapt 170 percent. Not that the upscale stuff has simply evaporated either; today, bottled water is the No. 1 item by units sold at Whole Foods. The average American now drinks almost 28 gallons of bottled water per year, while as recently as 1987 we drank fewer than six.

Yet the staggering popularity of bottled water has inspired a backlash. Royte traces the raucous fight over water rights in one community, Fryeburg, Maine, where spring water is tapped and transformed into Nestle's Poland Spring, whose green label is familiar to many a parched Northeasterner. While wading into the environmental problems with bottled water, Royte also learns that old-fashioned tap water isn't just suffering from a bottled water industry smear campaign -- antibiotics with your water, anyone?

Salon spoke with Royte by phone from her Brooklyn home office, where she drinks her tap water, filtered, in a glass. (Listen to the interview with Royte here.)

How did bottled water get so popular?

What really happened was a kind of unglamorous technological invention -- the introduction of PET plastic, which is polyethylene terephthalate. It's the stuff with the number "1" on the bottom, and it's what most bottled water comes in now. Before, bottlers could put their product into polyvinyl chloride plastic, but it was heavier and more expensive, and it looked a little dull. PET was really clear, lightweight and cheap, which made it very easy to put a lot of water into bottles.

After the advent of PET plastic, Coke and Pepsi got into the business in the '90s. Pepsi had Aquafina and Coke had Dasani. Since they already had these great distribution systems set up, it was easy for them to push their water onto supermarket shelves and into gas station coolers and everywhere. They started spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising that appealed to our interest in celebrities, models, beauty, fashion and wellness.

Why do you think that water in single-serving sizes became so popular?

Marketers hammered home this idea that we need to stay hydrated, and we need to drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. If it was so important to drink all that, then portability became important.

It turns out there is no scientific basis for that eight by eight rule.

Where did that idea come from?

It got its start when the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council put out a report sometime in the '40s that said adults should drink about a milliliter of water for each calorie of food, which meant that we should drink about 64 to 80 ounces a day.

But the next sentence in the report was ignored. It says, "Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods." When you think about pasta or rice, you know that it absorbs an enormous amount of water. And we get water in coffee and in beer and in soda, and all the other things that we drink. But it was easy to ignore that part of it, if you were selling water.

Is that why you see people walking down the street, toting water everywhere that they go?

I think there are some psychological reasons, too -- water as a security blanket. People like to be holding something in their hand. Some people just feel better having their own portable hydration system with them.

We're also primed for convenience. We've become very spoiled as a culture, unwilling to accept being uncomfortable for a short while until we get to a sink or a faucet.

Is there an element of germ phobia as well? Fear of using water fountains?

Oh, yes. An entire generation has grown up thinking that fountains equal filth, and the bottled water people are happy to exploit that. Some of the ads for water and even for water filters play on this, hyping this idea of public fountains being not quite pure.

Bottled water has become so popular that in the last year, it's experienced a backlash. It's now a symbol of ecological sin. Why?

In the beginning of 2007, Alice Waters declared that she would no longer sell bottled water. She took it off her menu. Then, many mayors across the country decided to stop spending taxpayer money on bottled water in city buildings. That gave the movement a bit of a push.

The carbon footprint of the water bottle has really caught people's imaginations -- the amount of oil it takes to make all these plastic water bottles, and the amount of oil and energy it takes to transport the bottles to market, and to keep them cold, and then to haul them away again to landfills, since only 14 percent of them go back into recycling systems.

Why are so few of these bottles recycled?

Mostly people drink water when they're out and about. We spend a lot more time commuting these days, going to school or going to work, or even for recreation, so we're traveling around a lot more, and we're traveling in places that don't have a blue bin around for the water bottle to go in.

Also, another big problem is that only two of the 11 states that have bottle bills take water bottles in those systems. If the bottle bills included the so-called New Age drinks, which are bottled waters and teas and sports drinks, that is another way we would get a whole lot more bottles back into recycling.

Next page: Are Coke and Pepsi just selling tap water?