Bottled water: A river of money

The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says "from the islands of Fiji." Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles), almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji's two-lane King's Highway.

Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, because the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles' journey is even longer. Half of the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation -- which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the Pacific Ocean and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

The pollution behind the purity

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity, something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on Earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

Each water bottler has its own version of this oxymoron: that something as pure and clean as water leaves a contrail.

San Pellegrino's 1-liter glass bottles -- so much a part of the mystique of the water itself -- weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh, dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption. The bottles are washed and rinsed, with mineral water, before being filled with sparkling Pellegrino -- it takes up 2 liters of water to prepare the bottle for the liter that's sold.

The bubbles in San Pellegrino come naturally from the ground, as the label says, but not at the San Pellegrino source. Pellegrino chooses its carbon dioxide carefully -- it is extracted from supercarbonated volcanic spring waters in Tuscany, then trucked north and bubbled into Pellegrino.

Poland Spring may not have any oceans to traverse, but it still must be trucked hundreds of miles from Maine to markets and convenience stores across its territory in the northeast -- it is 312 miles from the Hollis plant to midtown Manhattan. Consumers' desire for Poland Spring has outgrown the springs at Poland Spring's two Maine plants; the company runs a fleet of 80 silver tanker trucks that crisscross Maine, delivering water from other springs to keep its bottling plants humming.

Clean water gets cleaned

In transportation terms, perhaps the waters with the least environmental impact are Pepsi's Aquafina and Coca-Cola's Dasani. Both start with municipal water. That allows the companies to use dozens of bottling plants across the nation, reducing how far bottles must be shipped.

Yet Coca-Cola and Pepsi add a step. They put the local water through an energy-intensive reverse-osmosis filtration process more potent than that used to turn seawater into drinking water. The water they are purifying is ready to drink -- they are recleaning already-clean tap water. They do it so marketing can brag about the purity and to provide consistency -- so a bottle of Aquafina in Austin, Texas, and a bottle in Seattle taste the same, regardless of the municipal source.

There is one more item in bottled water's environmental ledger: the bottles themselves. The big spring-water companies tend to make their own bottles in their plants, just moments before they are filled with water -- 12, 19, 30 grams of molded plastic each.

Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year, 167 for each person -- durable, lightweight containers manufactured just to be discarded. Water bottles are made of totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, so we share responsibility for their impact: Americans' recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year -- more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

Another view

John Mackey is the CEO and a co-founder of Whole Foods Market, the national organic-and-natural grocery chain. No one may think about the environmental and social impacts and the larger context of food more incisively than Mackey, so he's a good person to help frame the ethical questions around bottled water.

Mackey and his wife have a water filter at home and don't typically drink bottled water there.

"If I go to a movie," he says, "I'll smuggle in a bottle of filtered water from home. I don't want to buy a Coke there, and why buy another bottle of water -- $3 for 16 ounces?" But he does drink bottled water at work: Whole Foods' house brand, 365 Water.

"You can compare bottled water to tap water and reach one set of conclusions," says Mackey, referring both to environmental and social ramifications. "But if you compare it with other packaged beverages, you reach another set of conclusions.

"It's unfair to say bottled water is causing extra plastic in landfills and it's using energy transporting it," Mackey says. "There's a substitution effect -- it's substituting for juices and Coke and Pepsi."

Indeed, we still drink almost twice the amount of soda as water -- which is, in fact, 90% water and also in containers made to be discarded. If bottled water raises environmental and social issues, don't soft drinks raise all those issues, plus obesity concerns?

What's different about water, of course, is that it runs from taps in our homes and from fountains in public spaces. Soda does not.

'I don't think water should be picked on'

As for the energy used to transport water from overseas, Mackey says it is no more or less wasteful than the energy used to bring merlot from France or coffee from Ethiopia, raspberries from Chile or iPods from China.

"Have we now decided that the use of any fossil fuel is somehow unethical?" Mackey asks. "I don't think water should be picked on. Why is the iPod OK and the water is not?"

Continued: The ethicist's approach

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