Water week: why we buy it bottled when it drops from the sky for free

Local supermarkets stock a variety of bottled drinking water brands, but tests show it is just as good from the tap. Ravindranath K / The National

As advertising goes, PepsiCo’s 2001 commercial plugging its bottled water Aquafina, voiced by kooky Friends actress Lisa Kudrow, was refreshingly honest. “Aquafina,” went the pay-off line, was “so pure, we promise nothing.”

Nothing, other than plain old tap water mixed with a few minerals and decanted into a slickly labelled plastic bottle, was precisely what you got – and, with brands including Aquafina, rival Coca-Cola’s Arwa and Nestlé’s Pure Life, among others, what you still get.

Despite the evocative mountain scenery on the label, Aquafina, just like 40 per cent of all bottled water, comes from public water supplies.

“Sure,” noted an admiring US editorial in Advertising Age in 2001, “their tap water is ‘purified’ by a common reverse-osmosis process. But it purifies what is already free of anything the Environmental Protection Agency and the states believe is harmful.”

Somehow, though, the public had come to associate bottled water with health and, “if you were PepsiCo, wouldn’t you give the suckers what they want?”

And, for the past 15 years, the suckers have been lapping it up in ever greater volumes.

Throughout the developed world, tap water has never been more available, palatable and reliable, yet year-on-year sales of bottled water are increasing dramatically.

Astonishingly, some time this year bottled water is expected to overtake carbonated soft drinks, such as Coke and Pepsi, as the number one beverage in the US. According to the International Bottled Water Association, which represents US and international bottlers, distributors and suppliers, in 2015 Americans bought 44.2 billion litres of the stuff – up 7.6 per cent from 2014 and equivalent to over 136 litres per person.

It’s a similar story around the world: in 2014 more than 282 billion litres of bottled water were sold globally and sales are increasing by 10 per cent every year.

So how did we fall for what the author Elizabeth Royte describes as an “unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the 20th and 21st centuries”? In her 2008 book, “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It”, Royte laid at least part of the blame at the doorstep of the consumer. Bottled water might cost vastly more than tap – anything from 240 to 10,000 times as much, depending on brand and source – but the sheer convenience of the bottled variety, she wrote, played into “our ever-growing laziness and impatience”.

The man credited with first tapping into that was Gustave Leven, the son of a Parisian stockbroker who in 1947 snapped up the assets of a failed former spa and spring-water company in Vergèze, a small village in the south of France.

In the words of the official history of Perrier, by global food giant Nestlé, which took over the company in 1992, Leven “came across the abandoned spring and concluded that if the people of Vergèze could sell a natural mineral water for three times the price of a bottle of wine, then the company must have remarkable potential”.

Leven went on to exploit that potential to the full. In the mid-Seventies he launched an all-out marketing assault on the US and, thanks to a series of commercials voiced by the actor Orson Welles, created an entirely new global product market virtually overnight.

It wasn’t long before big-hitters such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo had cottoned on to an astonishing commercial truth. Perrier, naturally carbonated by volcanic gases bubbling through rainwater, was one thing. But it turned out that, given the right packaging and advertising, people were actually prepared to pay good money for the stuff that, in many cases, they already got for nothing from the taps in their homes.

Perrier is still available in the US, of course, but today it’s a tiny bit-player in a market dominated by non-sparkling, US-produced water. This accounts for 96 per cent of bottled water sales in the US – a market worth in excess of US$13 billion in 2014, up from US$6 billion in 2000.

And it’s taken more than wacky voiceovers by much-loved sitcom stars to pull this off. Fear has also played a part.

“How do you convince consumers to buy something that is essentially the same as a far cheaper and more easily accessible alternative?” asks Peter Gleick, water expert and founder of The Pacific Institute, in Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water.

“You promote perceived advantages of your product, and you emphasise the flaws in your competitor’s product.” For water bottlers “this means selling safety, style and convenience, and playing on consumer’s fears … of sickness and of invisible contamination”.

To achieve this, the multinational conglomerates behind the bottled water industry have adopted and adapted the PR playbook written by industries such as tobacco, oil and sugar, hiring academic mouthpieces and setting up supposedly “independent” non-profit organisations to generate and peddle information harmful to tap water, its greatest rival.

The bottled water industry long ago declared war on tap water, a war of disinformation it appears to be winning around the world. Tap water, declared PepsiCo’s vice-chair in 2000, was the company’s “biggest enemy”, a sentiment echoed that same year by the head of the company that makes Gatorade. “When we’re done,” Susan Wellington reportedly told industry analysts, “tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.”

The Drinking Water Research Foundation (DWRF), the International Bottled Water Association, the Natural Hydration Council, the Bottle Water Benefits Task Force, Bottled Water Matters … all of these, some more transparently so than others, are front organisations for the industry.

The DWRF, for example, purports to be “an independent, not-for-profit foundation” whose mission is “to provide education to the public regarding drinking water quality, production and delivery”. In fact, the organisation was set up in 1984 by members of the bottled and home water filter industries. Its current chair is Jack West, also chair of the Puro Filter Company, and various industry big names are represented on its board of trustees, including Nestlé.

West himself has authored a number of “Expert views” articles for the organisation, including one stressing the dangers of coliform bacteria in drinking water and another claiming that “lead contamination poses a serious threat to the safety of our nation’s drinking water”.

Contacted by The National, West failed to respond to questions about how the DWRF was funded, whether its academic spokespeople were paid and if its work could be characterised as scaremongering designed to persuade consumers to reject tap water in favour of bottled or filtered varieties.

One of the academic experts hired by the DWRF is Stephen Edberg, professor of laboratory medicine, internal medicine and chemical engineering at Yale University and director of the clinical microbiology laboratory at the Yale-New Haven Hospital.

In a recent article posted on the DWRF website Edberg wrote that moves in some US states to ban bottled water in favour of tap revealed “an underlying assumption that there are no health or safety differences between tap and bottled”. But “the facts”, he wrote, “tell another story … tap water has the benefit of not requiring a bottle but has challenges when it comes to delivering assured quality”.

Key words that leapt out of the following article included “carcinogenic”, “birth defects”, “sewage contamination” and “acute gastro-intestinal illness”. Professor Edberg did not respond to requests for an interview.

The International Bottled Water Association (mission: “championing bottled water as an important choice for healthy hydration and lifestyle”) rejects “claims … that bottled water sales are fuelled by expensive marketing and misinformation. The truth,” it says, “is far less exciting.” The success of the industry, it insists, “has always been consumer-driven and simply cannot be attributed to costly advertising and marketing campaigns. People realise that bottled water is a safe, healthy, and convenient product, and that is what motivates their purchases.”

Since 2001 the IBWA’s own advertising code has stated clearly that “bottled water advertising should not exploit consumer fears about the safety of public drinking water supplies”, but undermining public confidence in public water supplies has clearly played a part in the industry’s success, say campaigners.

“For decades, the bottled water industry has spent millions of dollars on marketing aimed at convincing people that the only place they can get safe, clean water is from a bottle, at an immense markup,” says Lauren DeRusha, organiser of Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign.

Sometimes, this has backfired. In 2006 LA-based company Fiji Water – whose “natural artesian water” is shipped across 1,600 miles of ocean from the South Pacific island of Viti Levu – ran an advert that proclaimed “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland”.

It was “only a joke”, Fiji president Edward Cochran said later, and “we had to pick some town”, but they picked the wrong one. Tests ordered by Cleveland’s water commissioner found Fiji bottled water contained 6.31 micrograms of arsenic per litre. While this was within the 10 micrograms allowed by the US Food and Drug Administration, Cleveland’s tap water had none.

On occasion, however, the industry is handed a PR gift. When news broke in 2014 that public water supplies in Flint, Michigan, were polluted with lead, members of the International Bottled Water Association rushed to supply bottled water to residents – and have been happily, and very publicly, supplying them ever since.

“Having access to safe, clean drinking water is important to everyone’s survival,” said a spokesman for the association in January, barely able to contain his glee, “but this becomes paramount when municipal supplies are compromised. During these times,” he added, “bottled water is a necessary and reliable option to deliver clean, safe drinking water.”

Doesn’t the industry have a point? No, says Ms DeRusha, of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign. “The industry attempts to point to crises like the one in Flint to advance its brands and continue to undermine the public’s trust in our public water systems,” she says.

But ultimately, us suckers are our own worst enemies, willingly paying good money for stuff that, at the end of the day, falls free from the sky.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than a bold new London start-up, CanO Water, which offers natural spring water in two varieties, still and sparkling, in designer-sparse white or black cans, priced at £21.49 (Dh98.60) for a 24-pack. Selfridges and London Fashion Week are already customers.

It’s not, explained Perry Fielding, the “creative” member of the three-man start-up, in the Guardian last month, really about the water. “The visual aspect dictates everything we do,” he said. “So it’s not just a product or a company or a drink, it’s actually an aspirational brand that you’d want to buy into.”

Gustave Leven would have approved.