The Coke Machine (19 page)

Despite its popularity, however, a growing body of evidence has shown bottled water to be no purer or safer than tap—and in some ways, potentially
less
safe. That’s because tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which imposes strict limits on contaminants and mandates daily testing and mandatory notification of problems. Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which by its own admission has set a “low priority” for regulating bottled water plants. Its standards are slightly lower on some contaminants, and it requires only weekly testing and voluntary recalls in the case of problems.

And sure enough, the benzene scare over Perrier and the bromate controversy in Britain are just the beginning of the problems with bottled water quality over the years. A classic study by the Natural Resources Defense Council of more than one thousand bottles of water in 1999 found that while most samples were safe, nearly a quarter tested above state standards for bacterial or chemical contamination (only 4 percent violated weaker federal standards). More recent studies have continued to find problems: In 2000, the American Medical Association found some bottled water had bacterial counts twice the level of tap. A 2002 study by the University of Tuskegee of brands including Dasani, Aquafina, and Poland Spring found mercury, arsenic, and other chemicals above the EPA limits. A 2004 study by the FDA found low levels of perchlorate, a derivative of rocket fuel, in samples of spring water. As recently as 2008, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found thirty-eight different pollutants in bottled water, ranging from bacteria to fertilizer and Tylenol, and concluded that consumers “can’t trust that bottled water is pure or cleaner than tap water.” (The study did not reveal the types of water it tested, saying only that they were “popular” brands.)

That spotty safety record of bottled water doesn’t let tap off the hook. The same analysts at EWG found that tap water from forty-two states met federal standards for contaminants but still included a range of toxic goodies, including gasoline additives and endocrine disruptors, for which the government had not set limits. In early 2008, the Associated Press reported traces of pharmaceutical drugs and hormones in the water in twenty-four American cities, affecting 41 million people. True, the amounts were virtually microscopic—present in parts per billion or parts per trillion—but doctors cautioned even those small amounts can have effects with repeated exposure. “After learning about all the things that can go wrong with tap water, I don’t know what to think, or drink,” sighs Elizabeth Royte, author of
Bottlemania
, a 2008 exposé of the bottled water industry.

Despite all of the conflicting studies and alarms, the truth is that in the United States, both tap water and bottled water are generally safe to drink. And that might be the most damning charge of all against bottled water, given the price difference between the two. On average, convenience-sized bottled water costs just over $2 per gallon, while tap water costs just one-or two-tenths of a cent per gallon—a difference of one thousand times. With statistics like these, it was only a matter of time, perhaps, before people began thinking what comedians from Dennis Miller to Janeane Garofalo have been telling us for years—that “Evian is just ‘naive’ spelled backward.”

Even as some newspaper stories questioning bottled water began to appear, however, the activists from CAI realized that none of the charges against bottled water would mean anything if they couldn’t address the issue of taste. The idea of the Tap Water Challenge grew out of a late-night brainstorming session in CAI’s Boston office in 2005, as the activists groped for a way to take the issue head-on. Not knowing what they’d find, they pitted the tap water in their office against bottles of Dasani and other brands; they were genuinely surprised to find that they couldn’t tell the difference.

In the early spring of 2006, CAI rolled out Tap Water Challenges in seven cities—including Boston, Austin, Minneapolis, and San Francisco—adding others every few weeks over the next six months. Everywhere they went, people were amazed to find they couldn’t distinguish between bottled and tap. Just as decades of advertising had convinced people they liked Coke Classic more than Pepsi or New Coke, it seemed the millions spent on branding bottled water had made people think it tasted fresher and purer than tap. And just like the Pepsi Challenge a generation earlier, the ready-made conflict of pitting two beverages against each other was irresistible to the media. Newspapers began running on-the-scene reports of die-hard Dasani or Aquafina drinkers chagrined to find they’d mistaken their favorites for Newark or Philadelphia tap water.

CAI’s Gigi Kellett, the national director of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, admits the group first chose cities they already knew had good water—including Boston and San Francisco, which pipe in water from reservoirs so pristine they don’t have to filter it. Soon, however, they realized they could hold them almost anywhere—even places such as South Florida that had a reputation for poor-tasting tap water. Oftentimes, the most skeptical taste-testers hadn’t tasted the water in years. When they held challenges in Miami—which sources its water from an underground aquifer before submitting it to a high-quality filtration and treatment system—they got the same results as anywhere else.

As awareness of the Tap Water Challenges spread, however, the activists found the issue that resonated most with consumers had less to do with the quality of the water, much less privatization and control of water resources. Instead, they were most concerned with the bottles themselves. In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore had just released the documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
, warning of the apocalyptic consequences of climate change and spurring consumers to measure their personal carbon footprints and carry canvas bags to the grocery store instead of wasting excess plastic. Likewise, there seemed something especially galling about wasting all of that plastic for a product that could just as easily be had from the tap. According to a 2009 report by the nonprofit Pacific Institute, it takes the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil to produce the plastic for all bottled water consumed in the United States in a year—enough to power 1 million cars. Add in the cost of production and transport, and that number increases to between 34 and 58 million barrels. (And worldwide production takes three times that.)

Then there is disposal. Nationwide, the average container recycling rate was 33 percent in 2009, down from a high of more than 50 percent in 1992. Much of that decrease was due to the introduction of bottled water, which has doubled over the past decade to nearly 33 billion liters sold by 2008—nearly all of it in single-serving PET containers. Since bottled water containers have been recycled at notoriously low rates of less than 20 percent, the Washington, D.C.-based Container Recycling Institute concludes that these containers have brought the overall recycling rate down. Add it all up, CRI says, and that translates to some 3 billion pounds of plastic bottles in the waste stream each year. Bottled water companies, of course, dispute the notion that bottled water containers are more to blame than other products for plastic waste. According to Joe Doss, president of the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), PET bottles represent only a third of 1 percent (.0033) of all trash. “If you can get your head around that, it’s very clear that these efforts to target bottled water are misguided at best and totally ineffective in dealing with the problem at worst,” he says. In some ways, he has a point—what makes bottled water any worse than soda, juice, or beer, which also use plenty of water in their production and are nearly as likely to end up in the trash? And in an increasingly on-the-go society, isn’t it better for people to grab a bottle of water at the convenience store rather than a sugary soda?

That’s long been the line of the bottled water folks, who argue that bottled water isn’t competing against tap water so much as against other beverage choices, like soda. “Every day in newspapers and on TV you see stories about increasing obesity and diabetes,” says Doss. “These actions against bottled water will have no good consequences if they discourage people from drinking a healthy beverage.”

Without trashing soda, Coke makes virtually the same argument. “Consumers are making a choice of bottled water versus another beverage,” said Coke’s director of water stewardship, Greg Koch, in 2007. “Do I want a Coca-Cola? Do I want a coffee? Or is it happy hour? There’s a time and a place for bottled water, as there is for milk and juice and beer.” In a sense, it’s the same argument that the company used for years to support drinking soda—consumer choice—updated for a new beverage.

As for recycling, Doss says the IBWA has lent support to curbside recycling initiatives—adding that two-thirds of bottled water is consumed at home, at work, or in offices, places where curbside recycling is readily available. Those also happen to be places where tap water is readily available, however, contradicting the argument that bottled water is necessary as an alternative beverage “on the go.” When that discrepancy is pointed out, Doss, too, falls back on the mantra of “choice”: “It is a choice, it’s always a choice, they should have that choice, bottled water consumers are choosing to drink both and there is nothing wrong with that.”

While that argument might float to some degree, it’s hard to say Coke and its fellow companies aren’t competing against tap water when they are churning out advertisements full of mountain streams and rivers emphasizing how pure and tasty their water is—not how easy it is to grab at the 7-Eleven on the way to the gym. As bottled water has caught on, it has taken over in more and more places that tap water used to be available—and even replaced tap water entirely in many homes and offices. Just as pouring-rights contracts led to a proliferation of soft drinks in the 1990s, now water fountains have disappeared at schools, airports, and municipal buildings, which all have contracts with bottled water producers instead.

The most dramatic consequence of that shift occurred at the inauguration of the University of Central Florida’s new stadium on a sweltering day in 2007. The stadium had been built without any water fountains, a fact discovered by fans when concession stands ran out of the Dasani they’d been selling at $3 a bottle. Some sixty people ended up suffering from heat exhaustion as a result of dehydration; eighteen were sent to the hospital. Initially, school officials apologized by handing out a free bottle of Dasani to each ticket holder at the next game; after widespread fan outrage, however, they eventually agreed to install fifty water fountains, an amenity that had somehow previously escaped their minds.

 

 

 

Incidents such
as these, coupled with the Tap Water Challenges, turned awareness of bottled water’s environmental consequences into a full-fledged backlash—driven by the unlikely champions of those most responsible for tap water’s production: U.S. mayors. Sick of being criticized about the water quality of their cities, mayors began canceling city contracts with bottled water companies and even began reinstalling water fountains in their city halls. Taking the issue further, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom took a resolution to the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June 2007 that would commit all member cities to phase out bottled water at municipal buildings and events. Joining him to cosponsor the resolution were two mayors from more conservative political territory: Salt Lake City’s Rocky Anderson and Minneapolis’s R.T. Rybak. When the American Beverage Association, led by Coke, showed up to lobby aggressively against its adoption, arguing that it was only the first step in banning bottled water citywide—a direct affront to capitalism—their efforts backfired. While the mayors stopped short of passing a resolution encouraging members to ban bottled water, they did approve a resolution to study the issue and its effects on municipal trash systems. More surprisingly, the study actually occurred, and a year later, resulted in passage of the earlier, tougher call for a ban.

By then, more than sixty cities has already joined the backlash, with Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Austin, and Providence all either canceling bottled water contracts or instructing city departments not to buy bottled water. At the same time, restaurants moved to take bottled water off their menus, starting with chef Alice Waters, the godmother of “California cuisine,” who nixed bottled water from her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse in March 2007. Soon after, Food Network favorite Mario Batali followed suit at his empire of restaurants, including Manhattan’s swish Del Posto.

If the summer of 2003 was the season that childhood obesity exploded into public view, the summer of 2007 was the season the United States woke up to bottled water. Even
The Economist
has called the success of bottled water “one of capitalism’s greatest mysteries” in an online editorial in July 2007, conjuring the patent medicine era by calling it the new “snake oil.” Kellett remembers the exact day when she realized CAI had won—July 15, 2007. While organizing a day to call in to Pepsi’s corporate headquarters, she was taken aback by a strange playback message saying executives were meeting to determine how to respond to activist concerns—a response CAI hadn’t heard in decades of organizing.

Finally at the end of the day, Pepsi declared that, from then on, it would label Aquafina with the words “public water source,” identifying its origins from municipal sources. If it had hoped through the action to stave off further criticism, it failed. Within two days, the activists were doing round-the-clock interviews with every major television and news organization to talk about how not only Pepsi, but also Coke, sourced its water from the tap.

Within just a few years, bottled water had gone from trendy to gauche. In the fall of 2007, CAI began circulating a “Think Outside the Bottle” pledge, asking people to drink public water over bottled water whenever possible. Within just a few weeks, it signed on several thousand people, celebrities among them, including actor Martin Sheen. In late 2007, actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Lucy Liu supported a project to charge $1 for tap water in New York City restaurants to raise money for UNICEF’s clean water efforts abroad. They raised $100,000. By that fall, Nestlé had joined Pepsi in revealing the source of its water on its labels—and went even further by including detailed water quality information on its website for all brands by 2009.