
By Michelle Nijhuis
Journalist Elizabeth Royte drinks tap water, but she spends a lot of time thinking about the bottled kind. In her new book, Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, Royte investigates the causes and consequences of the bottled-water business’ astounding growth. With her refillable water bottle in hand, Royte travels to Fryeburg, Maine, where a water-pumping operation for Nestle’s Poland Spring label divides the town.
In the course of her research, she also tastes fancy bottled waters with a water connoisseur, monitors her 8-year-old daughter’s water intake and conducts an informal poll of friends and acquaintances, asking whether they know where their tap water comes from. “Most people, even those who knew exactly how many miles the arugula on their plate had traveled, had no idea,” she writes.
We caught up with Royte to talk about hydration myths, anti-bottle mayors, and the very dubious connection between bottled water and better yoga poses.
SFR: Twenty years ago, you write, bottled water was a niche market in the US. Today, it’s a more than $10 billion business. What the heck happened? Why did Americans start drinking so much bottled water?
ER: The simplest reason is marketing. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on advertising that either told us explicitly or implied that bottled water was better. [Bottled-water companies] used words like pure and natural, and used images of athletes and models and celebrities—the advertisements were aspirational, they told us we’d be more like these people if we drank this product.
While this marketing juggernaut was going on, there was also, until quite recently, a total absence of criticism. There was no competition from tap water, because utilities don’t have their own marketing budgets or ad budgets to tell us, ‘Tap water is great! Drink more tap water, and you’ll be thin, and look more beautiful, and do better yoga poses.’ So on the one hand you had this tremendous force trying to persuade us that bottled water was better, and on the other there was no criticism of that message.
Some of the ads criticized the quality of tap water.
Yes, they’d let us know that this was the same water used to flush toilets. But I have to say that there are places where bottled water makes sense to many people. It doesn’t help that there are hundreds of thousands of [municipal] water-main breaks a year [in the United States], and whenever a water main breaks you get a boil water alert. In today’s day and age, ‘boil water’ means ‘buy water.’
Do we really need as much water as the ads claim—should we conscientiously be drinking eight 8-ounce glasses every day?
That was another part of the marketing. It was very clever of advertisers to tell us to drink more water—Pepsi actually spent $20 million on an award-winning campaign for Aquafina that just said, ‘Drink more water.’ No one has found the definitive source [for the eight-glasses advice]. Some people point to a report from the National Research Council in the 1940s that said that the average adult needs to drink what works out to 64 ounces of water a day—but in the next sentence, it said that most of that water can come through the foods that we eat.
Fruits and vegetables contain a lot of water, and I was told recently by [nutritionist] Marion Nestle that meat contains 40 percent water. Pasta and rice are two-thirds or more water by weight. But the bottled-water campaigns just told us to drink more water, and that’s why portability became so important. If you’re going to drink all that water, having it in a nice neat plastic bottle is crucial.
So is there a consensus among nutritionists about how much water you actually need to drink?
Nutritionists that I’ve talked to say that if you’re physically active, yes, you do have to hydrate, you do have to drink more—they’re hesitant to tell you to drink less.
And the elderly have to be reminded to drink more, because when you’re old the sense of thirst is one of first senses to go. But there’s no sound medical basis that we have to drink that much water—doctors basically say to drink when you’re thirsty.
You spent a lot of time in the small town of Fryeburg, Maine, where Nestle gets much of the water for its Poland Spring label. The company’s presence is hugely controversial there—what’s the crux of the disagreement?
First of all, the company came in, and in backroom, quiet deals, decided to buy water from a middleman, who was actually the son of the [local] water company’s principal owner. People didn’t know water was being pumped, and they didn’t know it was being sold to Poland Spring.
Once they started paying attention to the trucks and counting them, they got worried about what was happening to the aquifer…so there was some environmental concern, and then there was economic concern, people saying, ‘Hey, they’re taking our water and they’re selling it for a lot of money—where’s the benefit to the town? We’re dealing with all these trucks.’ Then, when Nestle wanted to take water from an adjacent town called Denmark, and pump it through a pipeline to a tanker station on the state highway, which happens to be in Fryeburg, the people who lived near the proposed station were horrified to learn that their quiet rural neighborhood would have 50 trucks in and 50 trucks out a day.
Then they got hooked in with people across the country who were unhappy with Nestle, with the whole issue with privatization and who owns the water. It is different all across the country—Maine is a place where if you own the land, you can take as much water as you like from the land.
There’s been a backlash against bottled water, not only in these small towns affected by the business, but among consumers in general. What’s behind the turnaround?
I think what’s behind it is the global warming movement—a few pressure groups have been very successful at educating people about the bottled-water carbon footprint and how much oil it takes to make, transport and collect the bottles…At the US Conference of Mayors, there was a resolution passed to stop the spending of taxpayer money on bottled water at town hall and City Council meetings (see “H2 Woe,” page 17).
For the mayors, I think it gave them eco-cred to say, ‘Well, you’re right, we’re spending millions of dollars on public water supplies, and we’re also spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for bottled water for our employees, and that doesn’t make sense.’ They were also spending a lot of money collecting empty bottles, picking up litter.
These groups also go to college campuses and do blind taste tests—they’re trying to show people that in most cases, you can’t tell the difference between bottled water and tap water. It’s worked—many campuses are removing bottled water from vending machines and improving or putting in more public water fountains.
You also mention that there’s a little snobbery going on here—that there was no backlash when it was this exclusive product that only a few people drank.
Yeah, as it became more popular and everyone could buy bottled water—Dasani and Aquafina and the Nestle brands were the affordable ones—it diluted the exclusivity of it. But I don’t think the backlash is based on this snobbery, I think the backlash is because of rising awareness—people want to appear to care about the environment.
I say in the book that it’s the same people who latched on to bottled water in the first place. People who were looking inward, thinking about their health, doing yoga, exercising more, were drinking what they thought was better water. Now, instead of looking inward, they’re looking outward and saying, ‘Wow, let’s take care of the planet.’ The bottle has become the mark of the devil, the equivalent of driving a Hummer. The cool thing is to have your reusable metal bottle, or your bisphenol-free polycarbonate bottle.
You end up with some kind words for reclaimed water, what some people call ‘toilet to tap.’ What’s appealing about it?
In the case of Orange County, Calif., what’s appealing is that California uses a fifth of its energy to move water around. Southern California is importing water from the northern part of the state, and importing it from the Colorado River—they have some local water, but the population is growing faster than the groundwater is replenished. Orange County was facing the prospect of building another outfall pipe into the ocean—they already have one outfall pipe in the county, but the county’s grown so fast, and there’s so much development in the watershed, that there’s so much more wastewater, so much more runs off the surfaces.
So they were going to spend $200 million to build a new pipe. Then they realized, ‘Hey, this wastewater isn’t something you get rid of, this is a resource—we could save the money, not build the new outfall pipe and clean this water up.’ They treat the wastewater, they run it through ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, UV light and hydrogen peroxide, and then they put it back into the groundwater basin.
People have said that reclaimed water is an option of last resort, but it does seem to be a last-resort time in these very dry places. So I think I was actually more skeptical in the book than I am now, because I visited the [Orange County] plant after the book was finished. I’d talked to people who were worried about membrane rupture and so on, but then when I visited the plant, they were very persuasive. I saw all the systems and safeguards in place. Of course, I think conservation is the first thing we should do, and then we should work on efficiency, on stopping leaks, before we get to last option time. But Southern California is growing rapidly, and it doesn’t have too many other water resources. It doesn’t have much of a choice.
Where do you see the bottled-water business going in the future? Who’s going to be drinking the stuff, and why?
While I see the backlash growing, I also see bottled-water sales going up—the rate of growth has slowed, but there is still growth. I think that some people are so afraid of their water, for good reasons or bad, that they’re going to stick with bottled water. I think that in the developing world, as people become wealthier, they’re going to go through the same steps that we went through in [the United States]. It would be great if they would leapfrog to the backlash stage, but bottled-water sales are growing enormously in China and India.
If we continue to ignore our municipal water supplies, and we don’t fix our infrastructure, more people will have to turn to bottled water. That’s the tragedy of it; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we don’t fight for our public water supplies—for watershed protection, more money for advanced treatment technology, stopping polluters—the more we’re going to have to drink bottled water, and then we’ll have this horrible two-tiered system where only those who can afford to drink good water will have access to it—in bottles.
Read this story's companion piece: H2 WOE