Bottled water: A river of money

By Fast Company

The largest bottled-water factory in North America is on the outskirts of Hollis, Maine. In the back of the plant stretches the staging area for finished product: 24 million bottles of Poland Spring water.

As far as the eye can see, there are double-stacked pallets of half-pint bottles, half-liters, liters, "aquapods" for school lunches and 2.5-gallon jugs for refrigerators.

We Americans pitch 38 billion water bottles a year into landfills -- in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic. And 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coca-Cola (KO, news, msgs) and PepsiCo (PEP, news, msgs).

The Hollis factory holds a virtual lake of Poland Spring water, conveniently celled off in plastic and extending across 6 acres, 8 feet high. A week ago, the lake was still underground; within five days, it will all be gone, to supermarkets and convenience stores across the Northeast, replaced by another lake's worth of bottles.

Looking at the piles of water, you can have only one thought: We sure are thirsty.

Water, water everywhere

Bottled water has become the indispensable prop in our lives and our culture. It starts the day in lunchboxes; it goes to every meeting, lecture hall and soccer match; it's in our cubicles at work and the cup holder of the treadmill at the gym; and it's rattling around half-finished on the floor of nearly every minivan in America.

Fiji Water shows up on the ABC show "Brothers & Sisters"; Poland Spring cameos routinely on NBC's "The Office." Many hotel rooms offer bottled water for sale alongside the increasingly ignored ice bucket and drinking glasses. At Whole Foods Market (WFMI, news, msgs), the upscale emporium of the organic and exotic, bottled water is the No. 1 item by units sold.

Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, Americans spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina and Dasani water than they spent on iPods or movie tickets -- $15 billion. It's expected to be $16 billion this year.

Bottled water is a drink phenomenon of the times. American generations raised on tap water and water fountains now go through a billion bottles of water a week, and they're raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. Americans have come to pay good money -- two or three or four times the cost of gasoline -- for a product they've always gotten, and can still get, virtually for free, from taps in their homes.

A story gets swallowed

When we buy a bottle of water, what we're often buying is the bottle itself, as much as the water. We're buying the convenience: A bottle at a 7-Eleven store isn't the same product as tap water, any more than a cup of coffee at Starbucks is the same as a cup of coffee from the Krups machine on your kitchen counter. And we're buying the artful story the water companies tell us about the water: where it comes from, how healthy it is, what it says about us. Surely, among the choices we can make, bottled water isn't just good -- it's positively virtuous.

Except for this: Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. About 1 billion bottles of water a week are moved around in ships, trains and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 8 1/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water -- you have to leave empty space.)

Continued: Billions lack safe water

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