“Pop Culture in a Bottle” - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 261

tax on bottled water to pay for improvements to municipal water systems, after a broken
water main let 2 million Massachusetts residents without potable water.
In the mid-2000s, Nestlé's water business saw annual growth rates of 15 percent a
year, as Americans' per capita consumption of bottled water spiked from sixteen gallons
in 2000 to twenty-nine gallons in 2007. But its US sales fell 13 percent, to $4.2 billion,
between 2007 and 2009. The company's efforts to open new bottling operations have
been contentious in some parts of the country. After six years of attempting to use a
spring in Northern California, Nestlé bowed to critics and let. It took six years of litiga-
tion for the company to reach a settlement over using a spring in Michigan, and it had
to agree to forty-four conditions before it was allowed to use a source in Colorado. In
2010, Nestlé was fighting activists over the use of springs in Oregon and Idaho.
Kim Jeffery of NWNA bristled at the criticism and complained that emotion had
clouded the facts. A typical Nestlé plant, he says, draws 150 million gallons of water an-
nually—about the same as a golf course or a large farm—and is too closely watched by
state regulators for it to deplete water supplies. “We use less water per gallon of finished
product than any other beverage,” Jeffery said. “Soft drinks use three gallons of water
to make one gallon of soda. Beer uses a four-to-one ratio. Milk and hamburgers use a
lot more. Agriculture uses seventy percent of the nation's water. We use an infinitesimal
amount compared to them. Let's not attack the ass end of the elephant here.”
As for the plastic problem? “Thousands of beverages come in plastic
bottles—Gatorade uses a thick plastic bottle that weighs five times what Nestlé bottles
do. Has anybody suggested that we should stop drinking Gatorade? I don't think so.”
The half-liter bottle Nestlé introduced in 2010 is the lightest on the market, using 9.1
grams of plastic instead of the usual nineteen grams, representing a 20 percent reduc-
tion in plastic. “Recycling is something we take very seriously,” said Jeffery. “But why
should bottled water carry the whole load? If you want to get serious about plastic, you
need to look at the entire packaged-food business.”
It is a fair point, and it gets at a deeper issue.
Society has prized convenience over all else and has been willing to pay exorbitant
amounts for seemingly cheap, healthful products such as bottled water. But today, as
Americans contend with a sot economy, have taken an interest in high-quality food,
and have adopted a less consumerist and more environmentally aware lifestyle, the
value—perceived and actual—of bottled water is shifting. Only a few years ago, Hum-
mers and Marlboro cigarettes were status goods; now they are regarded as symbols of
poor judgment, at least among the intelligentsia. Bottled water hasn't quite fallen into
that category yet, but it runs the risk.
As Robert Glennon , a water-law expert at the University of Arizona, notes, “The
problem of bottled water is it's a new, unexpected, and hundred-percent consumptive