Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States.  But today, bottled water has become indispensable in our lives.  We put it in lunch boxes, it goes to meetings, lecture halls, and soccer matches.  It’s in our cubicles at work, cup holders of the treadmill at the gym; and it’s rattling around, half-finished, on the floorboards of our cars. 

 When we buy a bottle of water, what we’re buying is the bottle itself.  We’re buying the convenience and we’re buying the story the water companies tell us about the water–where it comes from and how healthy it is.  If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000. 

 In addition, we buy bottled water because we think it’s healthy. Which it is, of course: anyone who buys a bottle of water instead of a 16-ounce Coke from a vending machine is making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn’t healthier, or safer than tap water. While the United States is the single biggest consumer in the world’s $50 billion bottled-water market,  it also has universally reliable tap water. Tap water in this country, with rare exceptions, is safe. It is monitored constantly, and the test results are made public.   

Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water.  Worldwide, 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water; 4,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water.

There is one more problem with bottled water: the bottles themselves.  We pitch 38 billion water bottles a year into landfills –in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic. Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year, 167 for each person. These are durable, lightweight containers manufactured just to be discarded. Water bottles are made of totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, so we share responsibility for their impact. Our recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year–more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

Some of the water companies are aware that they are under environmental scrutiny like never before. Nestlé Waters has just redesigned its half-liter bottle, the most popular size among the 18 billion bottles the company will mold this year, to use less plastic. The lighter bottle and cap require 15 grams of plastic instead of 19 grams, a reduction of 20%. The bottle feels flimsy–it uses half the plastic of Fiji Water’s half-liter bottle–and CEO Jeffery says that crushable feeling should be the new standard for bottled-water cachet.  

Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the car cup holders–that happens because of a fundamental thoughtlessness. It’s only a little more trouble to have reusable water bottles, cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the fridge. We just can’t be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that consumption of bottled water that we don’t need seems wasteful to me.