Bottled water is now a $300-billion global industry and the most consumed packaged drink.
So why are we drinking so much of it and what's the environmental cost?
Photo: artisteer / Getty Images/ iStockphoto
Sociologist Daniel Jaffee explores these questions in the new book Unbottled: The Fight Against Plastic Water and for Water Justice.
"Bottled water is not just a controversial product with lots of well-known negative environmental impacts, it's connected to a social justice crisis of uneven access to safe and affordable water around the world," he tells Kim Hill.
Sociologist Daniel Jaffee Photo: Supplied
For over a century, in most parts of the world, the provision of public drinking water has been a central function of local governments, Jaffee says.
"That legacy and that commitment to public health, unaffected by the profit motive, where local councils, their only essential motive is to provide good quality service, that is a precious gift and a precious shared resource that I think we really need to protect."
Now, in the many developing countries where there is still no safe tap water supply, the bottled-water industry is presenting itself as a "medium-term" solution, he says. has enabled
Some governments have been able to delay addressing the lack of public water supply, Jaffee says, by the United Nations' "rather controversial" 2017 decision to reclassify packaged water as a so-called improved drinking-water source.
"On the one hand, you could say that is simply a recognition of the existing reality in many places where a substantial percentage of the population doesn't have access to tap water and is relying on packaged water. But critics really assail that decision as granting governments effectively an escape clause, exempting them, giving them a permission slip to opt out of their obligations under the SDGs to expand water service.
"We've really seen that it weakens the perceived urgency of fixing broken drinking water infrastructure and feeds a vicious cycle of deterioration and distrust in tap water and then disinvestment."
Allowing bottled water to serve as a replacement for safe-to-drink tap water "weakens the political impetus" for governments to invest in maintaining and restoring public water systems, Jaffee says.
"[Water] is unevenly distributed and governments and international institutions need to prioritise it … Consigning those people to live permanently in a costly packaged-water world, morally, economically, and environmentally, I think we can't afford that future.
"It's a public good and I think it's going to require substantial public investment."
In wealthy countries, a combination of opportunistic marketing, increased demand for convenience and trending ideas about hydration and health have driven the bottled water boom, he says.
There's also evidence that one in five Americans now completely avoids drinking tap water due to subtle or even overt persuasion from that industry.
"[This is] not all companies and not all the time. But it is quite clear even just this year, there's a company here in the US, a bottled water company, whose ad portrays a corroded public water pipe and says something to the effect of 'Your tap water could be contaminated with bacteria and heavy metals'. That so-called 'war on tap water' does lead an increasing percentage of the population to fear the tap and that is the main reason that folks doubt their tap water and turn away from it."
Compared to public water supply, the bottled water industry is only "lightly" regulated, Jaffee says.
"Very often consumers are unable to find out basic information about whether bottled water has had contamination instances, whether it has been recalled, etc. We do know from peer-reviewed studies that the microplastic problem is more significant in bottled water. Someone consuming solely bottled water - in the US at least - would consume 22 times more microplastic fragments than someone consuming only tap water. There are also leaching issues as well so it's an uneven playing field. Public water authorities are required to be quite transparent and quite rigorous and the bottled water industry, which is often regulated as a foodstuff, has a weaker regulatory regime.
"It's very, very difficult to find out good information about the content and the contaminants contained in that bottled water. It's an uneven playing field."
So is the bottled-water production process, Jaffee says, with critics arguing the amount used is at a minimum two-to-one ratio to the amount produced.
Then, of course, there's the plastic pollution factor.
"Studies show that the energy impact of a litre of bottled water is between 1,000 to 2,000 times that of a litre of public tap water.
"As the world's most consumed packaged beverage, it leaves the others in the dust, actually – alcoholic beverages, soft drinks, etc. That means that it is responsible for the single largest slice of that."
With up to 700 billion single-serve plastic containers disposed of each year, it's clear we have a "global plastic pollution emergency", Jaffee says.
"The great majority are entering either landfills or entering the marine environment or aquatic environment. Beverage bottles are half of the marine pollution problem at this point. And we will never solve the global single-use plastics problem without addressing single-use plastic bottled water."
Although the beverage industry is "pretty wedded to single-use plastic" as its business model, other packaging ideas are being pushed for in campaigns by The Story of Stuff Project, which is urging Pepsi and Coca-Cola to sell beverages to refillable, returnable, durable plastic containers, and the ocean advocacy group Oceana.
"There has been a lot of research done on this and the estimates are that if we converted the entire global beverage industry to those returnable reusable plastic containers that could be used say 40 or 50 times each, it will cut raw material use and waste by 40% and greenhouse gas emissions by half. So that's pretty significant."
While living in New Zealand for a year recently, Jaffee observed "a panoply of local efforts" pushing for more points of access to free clean tap water in public spaces, including the grassroots campaign RefillNZ.
In the US bottled water market, Jaffee says there is a hopeful "counter-trend" with last year's sales falling by 1% for the first time in over a decade, while in Aotearoa sales are projected to decline in future years.
The return to public drinking water is a way of reclaiming a shared public good that our forebears funded in the form of water rates and taxes, he says – "It should be protected and revitalised".
