Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Charles Fishman is subtler than that, but it’s not hard to come away from his big Fast Company article — Message In a Bottle — with that conclusion. I adverted to the article in a post last month, but I didn’t get a chance to re-read it thoroughly until last night.

Fishman’s piece is a real eye-opener. Especially if you drink much bottled water, please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Meanwhile, here’s a key chunk from the early going of the article to set the tone.

Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We–a generation raised on tap water and water fountains–drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we’re raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We’ve come to pay good money–two or three or four times the cost of gasoline–for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes.

When we buy a bottle of water, what we’re often buying is the bottle itself, as much as the water. We’re buying the convenience–a bottle at the 7-Eleven isn’t the same product as tap water, any more than a cup of coffee at Starbucks is the same as a cup of coffee from the Krups machine on your kitchen counter. And we’re buying the artful story the water companies tell us about the water: where it comes from, how healthy it is, what it says about us. Surely among the choices we can make, bottled water isn’t just good, it’s positively virtuous.

Except for this: Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It’s so heavy you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave empty space.)

Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.

A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it’s just a bottle of water–modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don’t need–when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation–it’s worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is. And if you do ask, if you trace both the water and the business back to where they came from, you find a story more complicated, more bemusing, and ultimately more sobering than the bottles we tote everywhere suggest.

Especially when you consider the success of products like Fiji Water, the issues surrounding bottled water are myriad and far from simplistic, as Fishman goes on to explain. But if you have a concern for the environment, it’s hard not to conclude that the prevalence of bottled water is more than just a negative trend — it’s a big negative, and one that’s eminently avoidable.

And yet it’s also a $16 billion business, and a staple for giant companies like PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and above all Nestlé, so it’s not going away anytime soon.

Here’s more from Fishman:

Once you understand the resources mustered to deliver the bottle of water, it’s reasonable to ask as you reach for the next bottle, not just “Does the value to me equal the 99 cents I’m about to spend?” but “Does the value equal the impact I’m about to leave behind?”

Simply asking the question takes the carelessness out of the transaction. And once you understand where the water comes from, and how it got here, it’s hard to look at that bottle in the same way again.

I agree. In fact, I’ve decided not to buy bottled water whenever I can avoid it. I don’t think Big Water will come to supplant Big Oil as a target for environmentalists’ ire, but it’s surely coming into the crosshairs.