I am reading a highly edifying book these days called “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It” written by a journalist named Elizabeth Royte. It discusses bottled water as a multifaceted issue that has entered disciplines such as economics, environmental science, ecology, engineering and business. It is an excellent book and I recommend it to anyone interested in the hitherto numerous controversies surrounding bottled water.
I have been doing some reading on the energy side of bottled water and let me tell you, there are some really striking stats. A lot of the data in this blog post is derived from the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. So, we all know that bottled water costs a lot more than tap water. Somewhere in the range of 3,000 to 10,000 times the price you pay for tap water according to may experts on the economics of water. The numbers are not even worth sharing here because it has been statistically proven time and time again that bottled water simply costs a lot more than tap water. Anyway, this is what you should know about bottled water:
In the U.S., about 33 billion litres of bottled water are purchased every year. This is equivalent to 110 litres per person every year just for drinking purposes. The only beverage category with larger sales is carbonated soft-drinks aka CSDs. Yes this means that bottled water sales have surpassed beer and milk. Amid this exciting bottled water discussion there is a distinction we must make between two types of bottled water. Royte in her book makes this explicit in the first ten pages. “Purified water” includes municipal tap water that has received further treatment through distillation, deionization and reverse osmosis. “Spring Water” is derived from an underground formation from which water flows naturally to the surface of the earth. This is how corporations access this water and subsequently bring it to the marketplace. And by the way, most of the purified water sales come from the three largest producers of bottled water including Coke (Dasani), Pepsi (Aquafina) and Nestle (everything).
ENERGY ENERGY ENERGY. This is the fascinating stuff. So energy is required in every step of the bottled water process. It takes energy to make the plastic materials used in bottles, then we have to fabricate the plastic into bottles, process the water prior to the bottling stage, fill and seal the bottle, transport the “product” and chill it. That requires copious amounts of energy. Combined, this is somewhere in the range of 5.6 to 10.2 megajoules (MJ). To put this in perspective, to produce tap water it requires about 0.0005 MJ of energy. Notice the massive disparity in the total energy used, about 2000 times the energy cost of producing tap water.
I am not going to delve into all of the stages of bottled water that require energy but the transportation aspect I must share. Firstly, air cargo and heavy trucks are common methods of transport for bottled water and are both really energy intensive, air cargo being the most. Using LA county as an example, think about this, the spring water that arrives in Southern California that has traveled close to 9000 KM all the way from Fiji has a huge energy cost. It is transported on ships and once it arrives in LA county it has to be locally transported on heavy trucks which are egregiously congesting and polluting the area. Combine the shipping and local trucking, we are looking at a total energy cost of 5.4 MJ.
All of the bottled water that comes from France uses a lot of energy in the transportation process. The French spring water is transported by truck from the source to the French ports, then it travels by ship across the Atlantic ocean, and then trained from the Northeast U.S. to LA county and then locally by truck. Add this together and you have used 5.8 MJ of energy just for transportation.
Key message: Bottled water is energy intensive, expensive and environmentally degrading.
One aspect of bottled water that interests me, and is discussed in Royte's text, is the culture of bottled water, and the marketing that produces it. It is easy to compare bottled water to tap water, and make the case that it makes no sense economically or environmentally (or biologically) to purchase bottled water. This information is plausibly enough to sway a bottled water purchaser if they were buying bottled water instead of drinking tap water. But they're not. The majority of marketing and consumption of bottled water is instead of CSDs- replacing CSDs with a "healthier" option (another product of marketed "nutrition"). This reflects the relationship the Western world has with food and drink, and our habitual consumerism. As bottled water becomes flavoured, vitamin filled and accompanied with promises of "detoxifying one's body" or "improving immunity" it becomes harder to convince a consumeristic population to simply sip what comes from their tap.
ReplyDeleteA great blog and a great book- unfortunately the people reading both are most likely already stainless-steel water bottle toting individuals. This information is persuasive, but so is the information being released by giant corporations like Nestle, Coke and Pepsi.
Benjamin Franklin once said: "When the well runs dry, the value of water is known." Unfortunately wells are running dry, eco systems are being destroyed and droughts continue to plague communities because individuals are willing to walk into a convince store and pay $4.09 for a square bottle of water from Fiji. Madness.
-Kezia