Drowning In Deceit
I had 28 cousins on my father’s side and every Sunday we would go over to our grandparent’s house and run wild. I loved everything about those visits except the taste of their tap water. Actually the smell and taste. We affectionately referred to it as “Philadelphia” water. But that was long before the availability of bottled water, now an $11 billion dollar industry that has a distinctive bad odor of its own when it comes to its marketing tactics.
According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC), Americans consume more bottled water than milk and beer.
We’re guzzling over 9 billion gallons of water a year from 35 billion plastic bottles. The equivalent of 30 gallons, or 111 bottles per bloated citizen.
We buy bottled water because it’s convenient, but more importantly, because we think it’s healthy and clean. At least that what the marketers want you to think.
Face it, we all read less and rely more on quick visual impressions to make our buying decisions. The marketers know that which is why they brand their bottled water products with images of waterfalls, natural springs and snowcapped mountains.
They spice up their copy with words like “pristine,” “pure,” “untouched,” “smart,” “environmentally conscious (bottles).”
They show us beautiful, shapely celebrities (with fat endorsement contracts) who owe it all to their love of bottled water.
We see famous athletes drinking water in slow motion, spilling it all over themselves to accentuate the contours of their muscular hard bodies.
Suckers that we are, we buy the stuff by the case.
But the scent of Philadelphia water lingers in the air. And lately the industry has been taking a beating for its questionable marketing tactics.
Becausewater.com, an organization committed to “ensuring the posterity of water by providing access to sustainable solutions through a trusted marketplace supported by community initiative,” has come out of the bottle swinging:
“Bottled water is the biggest scam of the century,” they proclaim.
Let’s start with the cost, shall we?
$1000 a year on bottled water. That’s what you spend on average. And I’m sure you don’t want to know that each bottle only contains about $.04 worth of water. (Now I’m really mad).
And you’ve probably heard the comparison to gasoline prices. The average cost of a gallon of gasoline is $3.70. A one-liter bottle of water costs approximately $2.50 which would make it about $10 a gallon if you were filling up your car with it (cheaper to wet your whistle directly from the gasoline pump).
Because 70% of bottled water never crosses over state lines (too heavy to ship), it’s exempt from FDA oversight. That’s why there are a lot of cases of “spring” water actually being filled from a public water source and filtered. Eau De Tap Water. (Eau I feel so stupid).
And to add insult to injury, recent studies have shown that bottled water (2000 times more expensive than tap water) is actually no safer than tap water. AND you’re getting hosed on the price.
But perhaps the biggest concern is about those overflowing landfills. It could take up to 1,000 years for the chemically-enabled plastic bottles to be able to biodegrade. And not all the bottles even make it that far. Lots of them are littered throughout our neighborhoods and clogging our waterways. It’s a huge environmental issue.
So in summary: Bottled water more often than not comes straight out of the tap. It’s obscenely expensive. And is creating a garbage dump for generations to come.
How’d you like to have to spin that one every day?