Sales of bottled water are booming worldwide. Bottled water is now the most popular drink in the US, with consumption growing every year. It is portable and safe, and it can be easily stored. It is also arguably the most nonsensical consumer product in the world—a liquid available from the tap for free, packaged and shipped at great cost to the environment, and sold at exorbitant prices.
Understanding what's behind the growth in bottled water consumption is a start to making the industry more sustainable. Studies suggest that in the US, fears of water pollution are a big factor. Andrew Szasz, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who has studied the bottled water phenomenon for more than a decade, contends that the industry emerged because people began to distrust their local water sources. Lured by slick marketing, consumers turned to bottled water to protect themselves from perceived health threats. The water poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan, added to their concerns.
Szasz describes the phenomenon as an example of an ‘inverted quarantine’. People are fearful of environmental threats, and rather than tackle the problem head on, through political action, they attempt to buy their way out of disaster. “It’s a perverted form of environmentalism where instead of taking on the problem, you create this clean consumable bubble around yourself,” he says. “Bottled water is an imaginary refuge. You get the illusion that you’re protecting yourself.” He also notes the part that the labels play, featuring images of nature in greens and blues, pictures of snowy mountains, and words such as ‘pure’. “The bottle itself sends a message,” he says. “This water must be pure because someone took the trouble of isolating it from the environment.”
The trouble with inverted quarantine is that it serves to dilute the political will to fix problems when they do arise in municipal water. “It lessens people’s concerns about the issue, because they believe it works. It undermines the political will to actually organise change.”
Reducing the environmental cost
And change is needed. The thirst for bottled water means that producers are having to find new water sources or increase extraction from existing sites. But many aquifers around the world are shrinking. Using satellite data, Scientists at Caltech found that one-third of the world’s aquifers are under threat.
The plastics used for bottled water are a big environmental cost. Nearly 14 billion gallons of water were sold in 2017: 70 per cent in single-serving plastic bottles, typically made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. All told, about 20 billion plastic water bottles are used each year. About 54 per cent of them are recycled.
As the industry has grown, so too has the backlash. Some environmental groups are calling for outright bans on sales of bottled water. The Natural Resources Defense Council says, “the best thing we can do to protect our waterways is try to keep as much plastic as possible out of the waste stream in the first place.” The environmental group recommends that people stop buying bottled water and instead carry a reusable bottle to fill from a tap.
These calls have not gone unnoticed in the bottled water industry. Companies including Nestlé, PepsiCo, The Coca-Cola Company, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and Keurig have a clear incentive to design better beverage-packaging alternatives to those in the business-as-usual model. Many companies have made sustainability officers part of the c-suite and given them a voice in their strategic thinking.
Of the beverage companies, Nestlé is the biggest distributor of bottled water and sells ten brands in North America alone — including Nestlé Pure Life, Poland Spring, Perrier, and S. Pellegrino.
Recycling is an area that David Tulauskas, chief sustainability officer for Nestlé Waters North America, is taking seriously. While in theory PET can be recycled and reused again and again, it often ends up as lower-grade plastic. “Part of our challenge is just ensuring that bottles remain at the highest level,” he says.
Nestlé Waters North America has committed to making 50 per cent of its water bottles out of recycled PET (rPET) by 2025, with an interim goal of 25 per cent by 2021—roughly four times the amount of rPET it uses today. Its Poland Spring brand will use 100 per cent recycled plastic by 2022.
Nestlé is working closely with plastics processors “to give them the confidence that there’s the market” for high-grade recycled material, says Tulauskas. They shred the bottles, clean them and send them to a resin manufacturer, who will keep this material separate. “That’s when we get the crystalised PET back,” Tulauskas says. Nestlé’s aim is to give rPET suppliers long-term contracts to provide incentives to invest in the technology.
Still, even high-tech sorting facilities and futuristic plastic recyclers can only go so far. First, consumers have to commit to putting their plastic bottles in the recycling bin to begin with. About half of all plastic produced today is used once and then discarded. Tulauskas says his company is trying to change that. Nestlé partners with Keep America Beautiful, a 66-year-old nonprofit that works to help teach people and communities how—and why—to recycle.
Changing consumer decisions is, however, the hardest part of the equation, and certainly beyond one company’s control. But what the drinks industry can do is make sure its practices are as sustainable as possible to provide people with clean and safe drinking water with minimal environmental damage.
