The Cult of Bottled Water

How the business of bottled water went mad

Excerpt:

The global bottled water industry is in one of those strange and energetic boom phases where every week, it seems, a new product finds its way on to the shelves. Not just another bland still or sparkling, but some entirely new definition of the element. It is a case of capitalism at its most hyperactive and brazenly inventive: take a freely available substance, dress it up in countless different costumes and then sell it as something new and capable of transforming body, mind, soul. Water is no longer simply water – it has become a commercial blank slate, a word on to which any possible ingredient or fantastical, life-enhancing promise can be attached.

And it’s working. Over the past two decades, bottled water has become the fastest-growing drinks market in the world. The global market was valued at $157bn in 2013, and is expected to reach $280bn by 2020.

... Of water: a substance that, in developed countries, can be drunk for free from a tap without fear of contracting cholera.

...or a substance that falls out of the sky and springs from the earth of its own accord, water has always had an extraordinary commercial lure.

According to James Salzman, the author of Drinking Water: A History, monks at holy wells produced special water flasks for pilgrims to take away as proof of their visit – a medieval example of the power of branding. For centuries, wealthy Europeans travelled to spa towns to sample the water in a bid to cure specific ailments. The spa visit was a signal of health, but also of status: somewhere to be seen, an association of liquid and individual that broadcasted social elevation – a distant precursor to Kim Kardashian clutching a bottle of Fiji, if you like.

In 1740, the first commercial British bottled water was launched in Harrogate. By 1914 Harrogate Spring was, according to its website, the largest exporter of bottled water in the country, “proudly keeping the troops hydrated from England to Bombay”.

In the early 20th century, however, a water revolution nearly killed the nascent business. After early attempts in Germany and Belgium to chlorinate municipal drinking water, a typhoid epidemic in Lincoln in 1905 prompted the public health crusader Alexander Cruickshank Houston to try out the first extended chlorination of a public water supply. His experiment worked, and soon, chlorination of municipal water had spread around the world. In 1908, Jersey City became the first US city to use full-scale water chlorination, and the practice quickly spread across the country.

The bottled water industry almost collapsed as a result. In the past, buying clean water had been a necessity for the rich (the poor simply endured centuries of bad drinking water, and often died from the experience). Now it was freely available to all. Why would you continue to spend money on something that now came, miraculously, out of a tap in your kitchen?

The answer arrived in 1977, in the form of what must be one of history’s greatest pieces of television advertising narration. “Deep below the plains of southern France,” rumbled Orson Welles in a voice that sounded as if it were bubbling up from some unreachable subterranean cave, “in a mysterious process begun millions of years ago, Nature herself adds life to the icy waters of a single spring: Perrier.” As viewers watched the water descend into a glass, and admired the glistening green bottle, marketing history was made. The advert was part of a $5m campaign across America – the largest ever for a bottled water – and proved a major success. From 1975 to 1978, Perrier sales in the US increased from 2.5m bottles to more than 75m bottles.

Comment: CanO advertisement above is a screen snap of their website. We bottle our own (from our own tap) using Klean Kanteens.  See Minneapolis: Our water beats bottled water, In Praise of Tap Water; Bottled Tap Water

Leaky water

Plumber’s Job on a Giant’s Scale: Fixing New York’s Drinking Straw

Excerpt:

All tunnels leak, but this one is a sieve. For most of the last two decades, the Rondout-West Branch tunnel — 45 miles long, 13.5 feet wide, up to 1,200 feet below ground and responsible for ferrying half of New York City’s water supply from reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains — has been leaking some 20 million gallons a day. Except recently, when on some days it has lost up to 36 million gallons.

Comment: Worthwhile read if you are interesting in civil engineering projects

"indirect potable reuse" or "toilet to tap"?

A Tall, Cool Drink of ... Sewage?

Excerpt:

When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

Opened in January, the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System is the largest of its type in the world. It cost $480 million to build, will cost $29 million a year to run and took more than a decade to get off the ground. The stumbling block was psychological, not architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of the last 150 years.


...
inside each of 16 concrete bays hangs a rack of vertical tubes stuffed with 15,000 polypropylene fibers the thickness of dental floss. The fibers are stippled with holes 1/300th the size of a human hair. Pumps pull water into the fibers, leaving behind anything larger than 0.2 microns, stuff like bacteria, protozoa and the dread “suspended solids.”

The excitement and the bubbles were backwash: every 21 minutes, air is injected into the microfibers to blast them clean. The schmutz goes back to the sewage-treatment plant, and the cleaner water, now the color of chamomile tea, is pumped toward reverse-osmosis filters in another building. Before we saw that process, Wildermuth led me underground to inspect several enormous pumps and pipes large enough to crawl through. I noted that everything was clearly labeled and scrupulously clean. Then it dawned on me: reassurance was the reason we’d taken the detour.

Comment: Fascinating article.

Hard plastic water bottles

A Hard Plastic Is Raising Hard Questions

Excerpt:

It’s a question many families are asking after reports last week that a chemical used to make baby bottles, water bottles and food containers is facing increasing scrutiny by health officials in Canada and the United States.

The substance is bisphenol-a, or BPA, widely used in the making of the hard, clear and nearly unbreakable plastic called polycarbonate. Studies and tests show that trace amounts of BPA are leaching from polycarbonate containers into foods and liquids.

While most of the focus is on products for children, including clear plastic bottles and canned infant formula, the chemical is also used in food-storage containers, some clear plastic pitchers used for filtered water, refillable water bottles and the lining of soft-drink and food cans.

While there is debate about how much of a health worry BPA really is, retailers including Wal-Mart have said they are withdrawing baby products made with it. Nalgene, the maker of a popular sports bottle, and the baby-products maker Playtex have announced they will stop using it.


Comment: I carry a 40 oz (Thermos brand) & a 16 oz stainless container of ice water to work.

14 gallons a flush!

Coming to Madison Square Park: Relief at a Quarter a Flush

Excerpt:

Generations of New Yorkers have mastered the act of nonchalantly slinking through restaurants and hotel lobbies where they have no business in search of a toilet. But the furtive quest for relief in public may become a fading art starting this summer, now that the city has settled on a site for the first of 20 long-awaited pay toilets.

After decades of fits and starts, the city will begin a two-year rollout of 25-cents-a-flush public toilets with the first being installed in Madison Square Park in June, said Kerry Gould, who is overseeing the project for the city’s Department of Transportation.

The department hopes to have nine more pay toilets in use by the end of the year, with the second probably going to the Bronx, Ms. Gould said.



Greetings, Earthlings. Your New Restroom Is Ready

Excerpt:

When the green light marked “vacant” is lit, 25 cents — coins only, no bills — starts the visit.

What follows is possibly the longest and most awkward 20 to 30 seconds of a person’s day. The door slips open like an elevator, but then it stays open, to accommodate those who need extra time getting in. Meanwhile, men and women in suits walk past. It is very difficult to look inconspicuous in a bathroom on a sidewalk in New York with the door open. There is just nothing to do but stand there. And the delay will not please those who are in distress.

A Toilet That Uses 14 Gallons? ‘Oh Gosh!’

Excerpt:

Some City Room readers were understandably perplexed by the 14 gallons of water consumed by each use of the spiffy new pay toilet at Madison Square Park. So we will break it down for you, according to what Cemusa, the Spanish advertising conglomerate that runs the toilets, told us:

1. Toilet flush: 1.29 gallons
   
2. Basin auto-cleaning: 1.2 gallons
   
3. Toilet auto-cleaning: 3.85 gallons
   
4. Floor auto-cleaning 7.71 gallons
   

Total (not including any hand-washing) is 14 gallons give or take.



Comment: Sounds like a nice idea until one considers the waste of water! Don't tarry ... after 15 minutes the door opens ready or not!

How to Purchase a Water Softener

Kare11: How to Purchase a Water Softener


Comment: Our water softener basically failed. We are getting some soft water but the unit (now 11 + years old) needs major repairs. The question for us was should we repair the old unit or purchase a new unit with a 5 year warranty. We opted for the new unit and it will be installed Monday. The article from Kare11 is helpful for shoppers. I called Surge, EcoWater Systems, and Culligan. We bought the most basic system without the fancy controls.

We new the existing system had problems because the brine tank would fill to the top and overflow. Or the brine tank would be completely dry to the bottom. While we were in Dallas, we had a major overflow.

Tracking underground pollution

Comment: Good article with graphics on Minneapolis groundwater and aquifer. Be sure to view cross section of the Prairie du Chien aquifer!

Star Tribune: water sources

Excerpt:

In a three-part series that ended Tuesday, the Star Tribune reported that 20 significant areas of groundwater contamination lie beneath 35 metro communities. The combined polluted zones are 2½ times the area of Minneapolis. Much of the pollution is in suburbs where chemicals from old dumps seeped into groundwater.

Only the most populated areas around the Twin Cities have the detailed geological information helpful to regulators tracking pollution in groundwater.

Minneapolis: our water beats bottled in taste tests!

Minneapolis marketing its tap water to other cities

Excerpt:

Minneapolis, Minn. — Before water from the Mississippi River reaches faucets in Minneapolis, it is coagulated, flocculated, carbonated, fluoridated, and chlorinated.

In other words, that don't rhyme, the water has to be treated with chemicals that make the tiny things floating in it clump together, making them big enough to get caught in filters. Water also gets dosed with disinfectants that kill other nasty things that can make people sick.

Some of that happens at the city's ultrafiltration plant in Columbia Heights in a room with more than 1000 white, plastic tubes stacked horizontally in rows. Inside each tube are filters that contain thousands of tiny straws made of a high-tech polymer. The water moves slowly through the filters and waste material gets stuck in the thin membrane of the straw.

Ultrafiltration is more effective than the older sand filtration method in removing harmful pathogens from water, according to plant manager Dale Folen. The holes in the membrane of the filters are small enough to capture things that sand can't
....
In 2007, the city dedicated $200,000 towards promoting Minneapolis water to residents and to other municipalities. Golden Valley, New Hope, Crystal, Columbia Heights, Hilltop and parts of Bloomington and Edina buy and use Minneapolis water. They pay a total of around $10 million a year and Rybak would like to see that list expand.

There are other reasons why public water is better than what Rybak calls "plastic water". The plastic bottles are showing up in greater numbers in landfills. Plus, he says, Minneapolis water tastes good.

"The water you drink out of the tap in Minneapolis is great drinking water. And we'll put that up against private, plastic water any day of the week. And in fact, in all these taste tests that are done. We wind up coming off just great."

Several years before the new filtration plant was built, Minneapolis tap water was selected over a couple popular brands of bottled water in a taste test on public radio's The Splendid Table.

Officials at the filtration plant say the taste of Minneapolis water comes from the addition of activated carbon which removes certain odors.



Comment: Nice slideshow! In contrast to Minneapolis, Plymouth (and Maple Grove) derive their water from wells.

In Praise of Tap Water

In Praise of Tap Water



Excerpt:

... almost all municipal water in America is so good that nobody needs to import a single bottle from Italy or France or the Fiji Islands. Meanwhile, if you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents.

Next, there’s the environment. Water bottles, like other containers, are made from natural gas and petroleum. The Earth Policy Institute in Washington has estimated that it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the water bottles Americans use each year. That could fuel 100,000 cars a year instead. And, only about 23 percent of those bottles are recycled, in part because water bottles are often not included in local redemption plans that accept beer and soda cans. Add in the substantial amount of fuel used in transporting water, which is extremely heavy, and the impact on the environment is anything but refreshing.

Comments:

1. Image from Multimedia Gallery based in London, England.
   
2. City of Plymouth, MN Water Report (PDF)