Walking into Costco, I invariably see families with their giant carts stacked high with cases of bottled water. In addition to the better known brands Aqua Vida, Aquafina, Arrowhead Mountain Spring, Crystal Geyser, Dasani, Evian, Fiji, Nestle, Perrier, and San Pellegrino, there are more than 100 others. Costco only carries nine of these, however.
Decades ago, plastic water bottles didn’t exist in the U.S. and most people looked for a drinking fountain when they got thirsty. With the development of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which most plastic water bottles are made of today, the bottled water industry grew fast.
Sales of these clear, lightweight and convenient plastic bottles of water took off in the mid-1980s. Consumption by the average American nearly tripled from 4.5 gallons/year in 1986 to 12.7 gallons/year in 1997. This trend has continued and total U.S. consumption in 2012 reached 9.6 billion gallons.
Americans drink more bottled water than milk or beer. We spent $11.8 billion on these cute little bottles in 2012, and drank on average about 30 gallons apiece. Depending upon where you might be, Costco or a sporting event, you can pay 50 cents to $3 for a pint bottle, or $4 to $24 a gallon, 4,000 to 24,000 times more than tap water. If you had to pay the same cost for a pint of gasoline as you pay for water at some snack counter, it would take almost $300 to fill a 12-gallon tank.
To put this thirst for bottled water in perspective, 1,000 people in the U.S. buy and open up a plastic bottle of water every second. Those 1,000 bottles are then emptied and thrown away every second, or at a rate of 85 million bottles a day.
Why are more Americans increasingly addicted to those convenient bottles? Well, mostly its fear of tap water, taste, style and convenience.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite the names on many brands (“mountain spring”), almost half of all bottled water sold in the U.S. is filtered tap water. Maybe even more surprising, tap water in the U.S. is subject to tighter regulations than bottled water, simply because EPA standards for tap water are stricter than those of the FDA, which governs bottled water.
Not long ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council tested 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of bottled water, and while most of them were found to be fine, a third had contamination beyond allowable tap water limits, including bacteria, arsenic and synthetic organic compounds.
Our tap water is treated very thoroughly and is tested daily for more than 24 chemicals and quality characteristics. For the city of Santa Cruz, visit http://tinyurl.com/l28gysa.
As far as taste goes, fill a bottle from the tap, put it in the refrigerator for a few hours and it’s as good as any bottled water. For style and convenience, it’s pretty easy to refill a reusable bottle, and more people are now aware of the environmental impacts of bottled water. It’s no longer seen as stylish to carry around a plastic water bottle from some exotic place such as Fiji or Iceland.
Most of the cost of bottled water is for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit, and the Earth pays the price. In 2012, the 9.7 billion gallons of bottled water required about 35 million barrels of oil to produce the water and another nearly 60 million barrels to transport it.
Estimates are that eight out of every 10 bottles are thrown out after they are emptied, with only two ever being recycled. In 2012, the bottles thrown out that ended up on landfills in the U.S., if they were all pint bottles and stacked end-to-end, would reach to the moon and back 15 times. That’s a lot of wasted plastic and energy, but consumption continues to increase.
While there are a number of places in the world where using bottled water is the safest alternative when you are thirsty, Santa Cruz County isn’t one of those places. We have high quality and extremely safe water, at a very low cost, right out of a convenient tap that you can refill your favorite container.
Gary Griggs is director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Long Marine Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz. He can be reached at griggs@ucsc.edu. For past Ocean Backyard columns, visit http://seymourcenter.ucsc.edu/about-us/news/our-ocean-backyard-archive/.
