Issue Briefs

In years past, children coming off the school playground would run inside to line up in front of a drinking fountain. Today, many students are flocking to vending machines instead, where they shell out money to buy water in plastic bottles. Meanwhile, school water fountains are now often broken or shut off. This trend in schools mirrors a broader trend: As municipal water systems in the United States, built many years ago, are aging and in need of renovation, the bottled water industry is using glitzy corporate marketing campaigns to convince American consumers that packaged water is superior to water that comes out of the tap. Today, as more people are buying water out of plastic bottles, tap water infrastructure is falling into disrepair, and public sources of drinking water are disappearing.

In 2009, bottled water sales in the United States declined for the second year in a row, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation. U.S. bottled water revenues went down 5.2 percent and the volume of water sold went down 2.5 percent. Pepsi’s Aquafina sales declined by 10 percent, Coca Cola’s Dasani went down by 7.9 percent, and Nestle Waters North America’s leading brand, Poland Spring, declined by 6.4 percent. This fall in sales may be bad news for the bottled water industry, but it is good news for the environment.

Over the past decade, an increasing share of the bottled water sold in the United States is coming from municipal water supplies. Categorized as “purified” by the bottled water industry, bottling companies purchase municipal tap water, put it through a filtration process, bottle it and then sell it back to consumers for hundreds to thousands of times the cost. Between 2000 and 2009, the share of water bottled with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) sold in retail stores sourced by tap water supplies increased by almost 50 percent. During that time, tap water went from making up a third of retail PET bottled water sold in retail stores (32.7 percent) to making up almost half (47.8 percent) of it.