Bottled water is one of the greatest marketing scams of the modern age. Take PepsiCo’s Aquafina brand, for example. Just by including a picture of mountains on the label, they can lead us to believe that this water originates from a natural drinking source. It’s essentially the same tactic used by several companies who bottle and sell water to the masses, as well as by food manufacturers who wish us to believe their products are ‘natural.’

PepsiCo recently admitted that Aquafina is really just tap water, so ask yourself, why do we pay 2,000x the price of tap for it?

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Nestle’s Pure Life and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, the world’s largest corporate water brands, are also guilty of this kind of willful misdirection. Three years ago, Coca-Cola admitted that Dasani is just filtered tap water.

In 2007, Corporate Accountability International pressured the U.S. manufacturer of Aquafina bottled water to make it clear to consumers that the drink is made with treated tap water. They said that PepsiCo was guilty of misleading marketing practices used to “turn water from a natural resource into a pricey consumer item.”

Although this effort began several years, activists are still pressuring the company to label all of their bottles with something that, truly, should be public knowledge.

“New labels will spell out ‘public water source,’ acknowledging the bottled brand’s shared origin with tap water. Aquafina is then purified through a seven-step process, stripping it of minerals and other contents commonly found in municipal water supply.” (source)

So, it seems not all of the bottles were labelled, which is why RT news as well as Greenpeace have also joined in to contribute to the bad press for bottled water, and we are happy to do the same. It’s just another opportunity to share the truth about bottled water with the world.

Important Facts About Bottled Water

1. Bottled Water Is More Expensive Than Tap Water

According to ConvergEx Group Chief Market Strategist Nick Colas via Business Insider:

The [bottled water] industry grossed a total of $11.8 billion on those 9.7 billion gallons in 2012, making bottled water about $1.22/gallon nationwide and 300x the cost of a gallon of tap water,” Colas says. “If we take into account the fact that almost 2/3 of all bottled water sales are single 16.9oz (500 mL) bottles, though, this cost is much, much higher: about $7.50 per gallon, according to the American Water Works Association. That’s almost 2,000x the cost of a gallon of tap water and twice the cost of a gallon of regular gasoline.

The article goes on to mention several other shocking statistics, like the fact that bottled water consumption and sales have increased approximately 350%, respectively, since the tracking of the dollar amounts in 1991. In that year alone, Americans spent $2.5 billion on 2.4 billion gallons (about $1.07/gallon).

In 2012, every 27 hours, Americans consumed enough bottled water to circle the entire equator with plastic bottles stacked end to end. (source) That’s not a comfortable thought, and it should have us questioning our activities on the planet, and whether or not the convenience is worth the cost in ecological damage.

2. Potentially Harmful Chemicals in Bottled Water

It takes a lot of oil to make plastic bottles. In fact, the amount of oil it takes to make plastic water bottles in the United States alone could fuel approximately 1 million cars and light trucks for a year. (source)

Not long ago, German researchers discovered endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which could adversely affect development and reproduction, in 18 popular name brand bottled water products. Of the 24,520 suspect chemicals found to be present in bottled water, the one that showed consistent results and illustrated anti-androgenic and anti-estrogenic activity was di(2-ethylhexyl) fumarate (DEHF). Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that can interfere with the hormone system; they can cause cancerous tumours, birth defects, cardiovascular disorders, metabolic disorders, and, as mentioned earlier, other developmental disorders.

“An increasing number of in vitro studies reports the presence of EDCs in bottled water [12], [13], [14], [15], [17]. With previous studies focusing on estrogenicity, the present work provides evidence for an additional contamination with steroid receptor antagonists. Using an optimized extraction procedure, we detected antiestrogens and antiandrogens in the majority of analyzed bottled water products. Moreover, the antagonist activity was very potent. An equivalent of 3.75 mL bottled water inhibited estrogen and androgen receptor by up to 60 and 90%, respectively. . . . From a broader perspective, bottled water from six different countries has been found to contain estrogenic [12], [13], [14], [15], [17], antiestrogenic, and antiandrogenic (this study), as well as androgenic, progestagenic, and glucocorticoid-like chemicals [16]. This demonstrates that a popular beverage is contaminated with diverse-acting EDCs.” (source)

Researchers used spectrometric simulation to narrow down their findings to DEHF as the only possible EDC giving rise to harmful activity. DEHF is also known as an anti-estrogenic compound, which means that another unidentified EDC must be present in the samples that showed anti-androgenic activity.

3. Bottled Water Quality Could Potentially Be Worse Than Tap Water

Not long ago, the city of Cleveland conducted a test on the Fiji Water brand and discovered that their water actually contained traces of arsenic, while the city’s own water supply did not.

How is this possible?

“Bottled water manufacturers are not required to disclose as much information as municipal water utilities because of gaps in federal oversight authority, according to reports released yesterday by government auditors. Bottom line: The Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, and U.S. EPA is in charge of tap water. FDA lacks the regulatory authority of EPA, John Stephenson of the Government Accountability Office told a House panel.”

– Sarah Goodman of the New York Times

The list is a long one, and it’s pretty ridiculous when you think about the fact that nearly 1 billion people on this planet do not have access to clean drinking water. More frustrating still is the reality that it doesn’t need to be this way. Children are dying by the minute from waterborne diseases and we have spent billions of dollars trying to vaccinate these populations, yet the same level of effort is not being made to provide clean drinking water to communities around the world.

Our greed seems to be the source of this problem… what do you think?

The Story of Bottled Water (2010)