San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents enjoy some of the nation’s highest quality drinking water, with pristine Sierra snowmelt from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir as our primary source. Every year, our water is tested more than 100,000 times to ensure that it meets or exceeds every standard for safe drinking water. And yet we still buy bottled water. Why?
Maybe it’s because we think bottled water is cleaner and somehow better, but that’s not true. The federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water.
The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words such as “pure” to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic, and chlorine. Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is. But even that doesn’t dampen the demand.
Clearly, the popularity of bottled water is the result of huge marketing efforts. The global consumption of bottled water reached forty-one billion gallons in 2004, up fifty-seven percent in just five years. Even in areas where tap water is clean and safe to drink, such as in San Francisco, demand for bottled water is increasing—producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy. So what is the real cost of bottled water?
Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing, and profit. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck, and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy our demand for the chic and exotic. These are truly the Hummers of our bottled-water generation. As further proof that the bottle is worth more than the water in it, starting in 2007, the state of California will give five cents for recycling a small water bottle and ten cents for a large one.
