“Pop Culture in a Bottle” - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 252

from a giant gong that promote a positive outlook; Holy Spring Water, said to be blessed
by a rabbi, a priest, a monk, and a shaman; 018 Fruit Water, “extracted from Australian
fruit”; Aquamantra waters, in flavors called I Am Lucky, I Am Healthy, and I Am Loved;
Spiritual Water, a purified municipal water sold in bottles with ten different Christian
labels, such as the Virgin Mary and the Hail Mary; and Tap'd NY, purified water from
the New York City tap that sells for $1.50 per bottle and has a label promising, “No gla-
ciers were harmed in making this water.”
Among the strangest bottled waters available is MaHaLo Deep Sea water , taken from
three thousand feet beneath the Pacific of the island of Kona, Hawaii. There, Koyo USA,
a Japanese company, pumps seawater, desalinates it, and sells it for $5.50 a bottle. Koyo
claims that its MaHaLo Deep Sea water is the purest, most nutritious beverage on earth,
one that is “older than Jesus.” Competitors have sprung up, and bottled water has now
become Hawaii's fastest-growing export.
Then there is Bling H 2 O, which comes in a corked limited-edition frosted bottle
embedded with Swarovski crystals. “Either you bling or you don't bling,” said the
company's ebullient founder, Kevin Boyd, a Hollywood producer. In 2007, Boyd sold
750-milliliter bottles of his water (from springs in Tennessee) at his Bling store in Los
Angeles for $40. The same bottle at the Tao nightclub in Las Vegas was selling for $90.
“This is pop culture in a bottle!” said Boyd.
In spite of this seemingly infinite variety of boutique waters, the realbottled water
business in America—the $10.6-billion-a-year phenomenon—is far more prosaic. It is
a consolidated industry dominated by four multinational corporations with names fa-
miliar from the supermarket: Pepsi, Coke, Nestlé, and Danone.
Pepsi's Aquaina leads the market, with 13 percent , and Coca-Cola's Dasani controls
11 percent. Evian is owned by Danone, the French food company known for its yogurt,
and is distributed in America by Coca-Cola. But the biggest player in the United States
is Nestlé Waters of North America (NWNA), which built a collection of springwater
brands across the country that together controlled 38 percent of the US market in 2010,
more than Cocoa-Cola and Pepsi combined.
Aquafina and Dasani are classified by the FDA as “purified water,” which is code for
tap water that has been filtered. In 2007, Nestlé introduced Nestlé Pure Life, which is
also a purified water. Approximately 44 percent of all bottled water is purified water; 56
percent comes from springs or groundwater. In other words, nearly half the bottled wa-
ter consumed by Americans is tap water that has conveniently been packaged in plastic.
Bottles of lightweight polyethylene terephthalate, or PET plastic, are automatically
“blown” by machines from resins made from fossil fuels, usually petroleum and natural
gas. In 2006, Beverage Marketing Corporation reported , Americans bought 31.2 billion