The Story of Bottled Water

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this is a story about a world obsessed with stuff

it's a story about a system in crisis.

we're trashing the planet

we're trashing each other

and we're not even having fun

the good thing, is that when we start to understand the system

we can see lots of places to step in and turn these problems into solutions

[music]

one the problems with trying to use less stuff

is that sometimes we feel like we really need it

what if you live in a city like, say cleveland, and you want a glass of water

are you going to take your chances and get it from the city tap?

or should you reach for a bottle of water that comes from the pristine rainforests of

Fiji?

Well, Fiji brand water thought the answer to this question was obvious

So they built a whole ad campaign around it

it turned out to be one of the dumbest moves

in advertising history

the city of cleveland it like being the butt

of fiji jokes

so they did some tests and guess what?

These tests showed a glass of Fiji water is lower quality

it loses taste tests against Cleveland tap

and costs thousands of times more

this story is typical of what happens when

you test bottled water against tap water

is it cleaner?

sometimes, sometimes not

in many ways bottled water is less regulated

than tap

Is it tastier?

In taste tests across the country, people consistently

choose tap over bottled water.

These bottled water companies say theyre just meeting consumer demand

but who would demand a less sustainable

less tasty, way more expensive product

especially one you can get almost free in your kitchen

bottled water costs that two thousand times more than tap water

Can you imagine paying 2000 times the price of anything else?

how about a $10,000 sandwich?

yet people in the US by more than half a billion

gallons of water every week

that is enough to circle the globe more than five times

how did this come to be?

well it all goes back to how our materials economy works

and one of its key drivers which is known is manufactured demand

if companies want to keep growing

they have to keep selling more and more stuff

in the 1970s giant soft drink companies

got worried as they saw their growth projections

starting to level off

there's only so much soda that a person can drink

Plus it wouldn't be long before people began

realizing that soda is not that healthy

and turned back to [gasp] drinking tap water.

well the companies found their next big idea

in a silly designer product that most people laughed off

as a passing yuppie fad

"Water is free," people said back then.

"what will they sell us next, air?"

so how do you get people to buy this fringe product?

Simple. You manufacture demand

How do you do that?

Well, imagine you're in charge of the bottled water

company

Since people aren't lining up to trade their hard-earned money

for you unnecessary product

you make them feel scared and insecure if the dont have it

and that's exactly what the bottled water industry did

one of their first marketing tactics was to

scare people about tap water

with ads like Fiji's Cleveland campaign.

""When were done," one top water exec said,

"tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes."

Next, you hide the reality of your product behind

images of pure fantasy

Have you ever noticed how bottled water tries to seduce us

with pictures of mountains streams and pristine nature?

But guess where a third of all bottled water in the U.S. actually

comes from?

The tap!

Pepsis Aquafina and Cokes Dasani

are two of the many brands that are really filtered tap water

But the pristine nature lie goes much deeper.

In a recent full page ad, Nestl said:

Bottled water is the most environmentally

responsible consumer product in the world.

What?!

They are trashing the environment all along the products life cycle.

Exactly how is that environmentally responsible?

The problems start here with extraction and production

where oil is used to make water bottles

Each year, making the plastic water bottles

used in the U.S. takes enough oil and energy

to fuel a million cars.

All that energy spent to make the bottle

even more to ship it around the planet

and then we drink it in about 2 minutes?

That brings us to the big problem at the other end of the life cycle

Disposal. What happens to all these bottles when were done?

Eighty percent end up in landfills,

where they will sit for thousands of years,

or in incinerators, where they are burned, releasing

toxic pollution.

The rest gets collected for recycling.

I was curious about where the plastic bottles

that I put in recycling bins go.

I found out that shiploads were being sent

to India.

So, I went there.

Ill never forget riding over a hill outside Madras

where I came face to face with a mountain

of plastic bottles from California.

Real recycling would turn these bottles

back into bottles.

But that wasnt what was happening here.

Instead these bottles were slated to be downcycled,

which means turning them into lower quality

products that would just be chucked later.

The parts that couldnt be downcycled were thrown away there

shipped all the way to India just to be dumped in

someone elses backyard.

If bottled water companies want to use mountains

on their labels,

itd be more accurate to show one of these

mountains of plastic waste.

Scaring us, seducing us, and misleading us

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