The Land Conservation Foundation Program in Law and Philosophy at the University of Illinois screened the movie “Tapped” in Champaign the other night and asked me to make a few comments after the film ended. “Tapped” was released in 2008 as an exposé of the bottled water industry. I’ve blogged about bottled water in the past, so I got the gig.
When I pre-screened the movie, I was a little concerned with, how shall I put it, the fact that the movie has a strong, definite, one-sided point of view. I generally agreed with that point of view, but the impression the movie leaves is that bottled water is one of the great environmental disasters of all time. Some of the comments I made were to try to put things into what I thought was a proper perspective.
I agree that bottled water is generally a bad thing, but it’s not because it’s siphoning off astronomical amounts of water by greedy corporations. Using a figure of 9.7 billion gallons of bottled water consumed in the U.S. in 2012 (the latest figure I could find), I calculated (assuming Illinoisans drink bottled water at the same rate as the rest of the country) that about 1.1 million gallons of bottled water are consumed every day in Illinois. That is not really a very large amount of water. For comparison, the greater Champaign-Urbana region (~150,000 people) uses about 22-24 million gallons per day. And in Chicago they use about 1 billion gallons per day from Lake Michigan.
The main environmental issue with bottled water is the bottles. The Pacific Institute estimated in 2006 the plastic bottling industry annually consumed greater than 17 million barrels of oil (about 0.25% of annual oil use in the U.S.) and produced greater than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Ironically, 3 liters of water are required in the process to produce 1 liter of bottled water.
And then there’s the phenomenal mark-up for the consumer. A couple of people in the movie said bottled water cost 1,000 or 1,400 times tap water; a recent article I read says 300 times. Whatever the mark-up, it seems pretty ridiculous. And many of the bottlers actually use community water supplies as their source. I found information from two bottlers in Illinois, Premium Waters and Puritan Springs, who use community water supplies. Puritan Springs uses our very own Mahomet Aquifer water.
The comment in “Tapped” that I most disagreed with, and it was stated 2 or 3 times, was that tap water was free. Tap water is not free, not even close. Anyone who gets a water bill knows that. Public and private entities that provide clean, safe drinking water spend millions of dollars to provide that service to us. Safe drinking water truly is one of the greatest public health success stories in the history of humankind. And we need to pay for it. A recent report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. water infrastructure a grade of “D”, mainly due to old, leaky water mains.
So avoid bottled water as much as you can. Get in the habit of taking your own bottle with you. Your wallet and your Earth will thank you.
