Fact Sheet: The Big Business Hustle of Bottled Water

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Five Reasons to Take Back the Tap

➊  A Colossal Environmental Footprint

The public relations push touting the purity and health benefits of bottled water hides a colossal environmental footprint. It took upwards of 82 million barrels of oil to manufacture the 4 billion pounds of plastic used to make the plastic water bottles sold in the United States in 2016. Most of these bottles ended up in landfills, as litter or incinerated. And bottled water companies profit by pumping out our groundwater, depleting local water supplies and ecosystems. 

➋  Cost: Bottled Water Costs More Than Gasoline

Bottled water was once marketed as natural spring water, but today it is mostly filtered municipal tap water. The bottled water industry has promoted the purity of its products under vague labels that sidestep questions about the origin of the water.

In just five years, the share of bottled water from municipal tap water rose from just over half (51.8 percent) in 2009 to nearly two-thirds (nearly 64 percent) in 2014. 

➌ Safety: Bottled Water Is Not Better Water

The federal government requires more rigorous safety monitoring of municipal tap water than it does of bottled water. Bottled water can, in many cases, be less safe than tap water. TWEET

Between 2002 and 2017, the Food and Drug Administration issued 35 bottled water recalls -- averaging more than 2 annually -- due to contamination from dangerous substances, such as bromate and arsenic (which may increase cancer risks), as well as the presence of E. coli, mold, pieces of plastic and milk allergens. 

➍ Predatory Marketing: Targets Women, People of Color and Immigrants

Bottled water companies have honed their marketing to target lower-income groups, people of color and immigrant communities in the United States -- especially Latinx mothers, children and women generally.

Latinx and African-American parents were more likely to buy bottled water than white parents, and they are dishing out more money on bottled water primarily because of perceived health benefits. The industry also specifically targets Latinx immigrants - despite admitting that tap water is much cheaper and usually safer -- in part by exploiting bottled water as part of the immigrant "heritage" of coming from places with less access to clean drinking water. Nestlé aggressively promotes its Pure Life brand to its target audience of recent Latin-American immigrants, particularly mothers. 

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 ➎ Dirty Energy: Plastics, Energy and Fracking

It takes a lot of energy and fossil fuels -- mostly from fracked gas -- to make billions of pounds of plastic water bottles annually. Bottled water is 1,100 to 2,000 times as energy intensive as the treatment and distribution of tap water. The 2016 U.S. bottled water consumption used the energy input equivalent of about 64 million barrels of oil. That's equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from nearly 2.5 million passenger cars -- nearly 11.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. 

What Do We Do Next?

Federal, state and local governments need to protect the quality and integrity of our water sources so that everyone has access to safe, affordable tap water that they trust. TWEET  Our public drinking water systems desperately need federal investment, but federal funding for water and sewer systems is decreasing. Reliance on bottled water may make people less inclined to support public investment in municipal water systems.

While there has been growing recognition of the need for investment in the United State' aging water infrastructure, how we will finance it is less clear. Plans that rely on privatization including public-private partnerships, such as those advanced by the Trump administration, are not acceptable.

Private control of our water systems will lead to rate hikes, job loss, lack of accountability and poor service. Congress must dedicate long-term public funding for fixing our drinking water and wastewater infrastructure so that communities across the United States can keep or make their tap water clean, safe and affordable.