Reports: Bottled Water

As many consumers in the United States and Europe are dropping bottled water, the industry is beginning to see a decline in sales. In fact, between 2007 and 2010, Nestlé Waters, the biggest water bottler in the world, saw its total sales drop 12.6 percent. Today, Nestlé appears to have developed new strategies to combat this challenging sales climate, which center around its Pure Life brand. Unfortunately, while the brand has been profitable, these tactics do not bode well for public water in the United States or abroad.

How to read your water quality report and choose the best filtration system for your home

The Take Back the Tap guide to healthy, environmentally friendly water for your campus, office or public space

Corporations have a financial incentive to hide their environmental impacts from an American public that wants to buy environmentally friendly products. As consumers have been looking for ways to “go green,” corporations have been accused of “greenwashing” — selling products as environmentally responsible when they actually damage the environment. Today, with heightened media attention on the world water crisis, blue is the new green— and corporations appear to be using similar “bluewashing” tactics to obscure their effect on the world’s water.

In the interest of protecting our water resources, Food & Water Watch invites all restaurant owners to join consumers in a national effort to kick the bottled water habit and take back the tap.
U.S. citizens are wasting billions of dollars a year on billions of gallons of bottled water, at least in part because they think it is healthier or safer than its counterpart from the tap. It is not. In fact, many bottling companies get their water straight from public water supplies, and then sell it at a price many times higher than tap water. Meanwhile, the production, transportation and consumption of the plastic bottles burns fossil fuels, generates mountains of waste and taxes our already overburdened public water systems.

Bottled water is overpriced, it’s no purer or safer than tap water, Nestlé is profiting off of communities and their precious resource — groundwater, and water bottles end up — by the millions — as worthless trash.

American consumers drink more bottled water every year, in part because they think it is somehow safer or better than tap water. They collectively spend hundreds or thousands of dollars more per gallon for water in a plastic bottle than they would for the H20 flowing from their taps.