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Nestlé and Others Cashing in On U.S. Water Infrastructure Crisis
New Report Examines Bottled Water Marketing and Impacts on People and the Environment
Washington, D.C., February 20, 2018 – After a decline during the Great Recession, bottled water sales are back and bigger than ever—even eclipsing soda sales for the first time in 2016. But people buying bottled water might not be aware that it’s nearly 2,000 times more expensive than tap water and four times more expensive than regular-grade gasoline.
In its latest report on the impacts of the bottled water industry on people and the environment, Take Back the Tap: The Big Business Hustle of Bottled Water, Food & Water Watch looks at the industry’s predatory marketing, the extraction of communities’ water resources, and the powerhouse lobbying that has helped bottled water corporations see sales soar since 2010.
In 2014, nearly 64 percent of bottled water came from municipal supplies—essentially filtered tap water—up from 51.8 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, total federal funding for public water infrastructure fell from $6.9 billion in 2010 to nearly $4.4 billion in 2014, a 37 percent drop.
“While Nestlé and other bottlers are profiting off of our public water supplies, critical water infrastructure problems are worsening,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “Nestlé is extracting water in Michigan cheaply to sell pricey bottled water, while Flint and Detroit residents suffer high water service fees. These water barons not only prey on distrust of tap water, but they also help reinforce that distrust through lobbying to enact policies to keep the bottled water profits flowing. Meanwhile, residents in Martin County, Kentucky, a poor community with a catastrophically failing water system, could soon see their water rates increase nearly 50 percent, even though many residents depend on pricey bottled water because of concerns about the safety of their tap water.”
Some key findings of the report include:
* A gallon’s worth of single serve bottled water costs almost $9.50 — nearly 2,000 times the price of tap water, three times the national average price for a gallon of milk and four times the national average price for a gallon of regular grade gasoline.
* From 2011 to 2016, the bottled water market grew 39 percent by volume, from 9.2 to 12.8 billion gallons, while the soft drink market shrank 8 percent in volume.
* In 2016, 4 billion pounds of plastic was used in U.S. bottled water production, requiring an estimated energy input equivalent of about 64 million barrels of oil.
* The International Bottled Water Association, Nestlé Waters NA, Nestlé USA and Coca-Cola lobbied Congress on issues including bottled water, water infrastructure, California drought relief and a National Park Service policy to allow parks to ban bottled water sales. These companies’ lobbying expenditures between 2014 and 2016 topped $28 million.
* Multinational bottling companies benefit from public disinvestment in water infrastructure, as the chairman of Nestlé Waters stated in 2009: “We believe tap infrastructure in the U.S. will continue to decline…. People will turn to filtration and bottled water for pure water needs.”
Bottled water advertising targets people of color, women, mothers, children and lower-income groups. Industry marketing strategies designed to promote the safety of bottled water to people who historically lack access to safe tap water (especially recent immigrants) prey upon those who may mistrust tap water and communities concerned about obesity and sugary beverages. In 2014, Nestlé spent over $5 million advertising Pure Life — the most advertised U.S. bottled water brand — and three quarters ($3.8 million) went to Spanish-language television advertising.
The report recommends people choose tap over bottled water, and advocates for water management under the public trust doctrine as a common resource. It also recommends that Congress pass the Water Affordability, Transparency Equity and Reliability Act (WATER Act), which would dedicate federal funding to our drinking water and wastewater infrastructure.
“We need to kick our bottled water habit—but we also need to adequately fund our water infrastructure so that everyone has clean, safe and affordable tap water,” says Hauter. “Congress must ensure that our water infrastructure is adequately funded to protect current and future generations’ human right to water in the U.S.”
View the report: Take Back the Tap: The Big Business Hustle of Bottled Water:
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/insight/take-back-tap-big-business-hustle-bottled-water
Food & Water Watch champions healthy food and clean water for all. We stand up to corporations that put profits before people, and advocate for a democracy that improves people’s lives and protects our environment.
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/news/nestle-and-others-cashing-us-water-infrastructure-crisis
In its latest report on the impacts of the bottled water industry on people and the environment, Take Back the Tap: The Big Business Hustle of Bottled Water, Food & Water Watch looks at the industry’s predatory marketing, the extraction of communities’ water resources, and the powerhouse lobbying that has helped bottled water corporations see sales soar since 2010.
In 2014, nearly 64 percent of bottled water came from municipal supplies—essentially filtered tap water—up from 51.8 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, total federal funding for public water infrastructure fell from $6.9 billion in 2010 to nearly $4.4 billion in 2014, a 37 percent drop.
“While Nestlé and other bottlers are profiting off of our public water supplies, critical water infrastructure problems are worsening,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “Nestlé is extracting water in Michigan cheaply to sell pricey bottled water, while Flint and Detroit residents suffer high water service fees. These water barons not only prey on distrust of tap water, but they also help reinforce that distrust through lobbying to enact policies to keep the bottled water profits flowing. Meanwhile, residents in Martin County, Kentucky, a poor community with a catastrophically failing water system, could soon see their water rates increase nearly 50 percent, even though many residents depend on pricey bottled water because of concerns about the safety of their tap water.”
Some key findings of the report include:
* A gallon’s worth of single serve bottled water costs almost $9.50 — nearly 2,000 times the price of tap water, three times the national average price for a gallon of milk and four times the national average price for a gallon of regular grade gasoline.
* From 2011 to 2016, the bottled water market grew 39 percent by volume, from 9.2 to 12.8 billion gallons, while the soft drink market shrank 8 percent in volume.
* In 2016, 4 billion pounds of plastic was used in U.S. bottled water production, requiring an estimated energy input equivalent of about 64 million barrels of oil.
* The International Bottled Water Association, Nestlé Waters NA, Nestlé USA and Coca-Cola lobbied Congress on issues including bottled water, water infrastructure, California drought relief and a National Park Service policy to allow parks to ban bottled water sales. These companies’ lobbying expenditures between 2014 and 2016 topped $28 million.
* Multinational bottling companies benefit from public disinvestment in water infrastructure, as the chairman of Nestlé Waters stated in 2009: “We believe tap infrastructure in the U.S. will continue to decline…. People will turn to filtration and bottled water for pure water needs.”
Bottled water advertising targets people of color, women, mothers, children and lower-income groups. Industry marketing strategies designed to promote the safety of bottled water to people who historically lack access to safe tap water (especially recent immigrants) prey upon those who may mistrust tap water and communities concerned about obesity and sugary beverages. In 2014, Nestlé spent over $5 million advertising Pure Life — the most advertised U.S. bottled water brand — and three quarters ($3.8 million) went to Spanish-language television advertising.
The report recommends people choose tap over bottled water, and advocates for water management under the public trust doctrine as a common resource. It also recommends that Congress pass the Water Affordability, Transparency Equity and Reliability Act (WATER Act), which would dedicate federal funding to our drinking water and wastewater infrastructure.
“We need to kick our bottled water habit—but we also need to adequately fund our water infrastructure so that everyone has clean, safe and affordable tap water,” says Hauter. “Congress must ensure that our water infrastructure is adequately funded to protect current and future generations’ human right to water in the U.S.”
View the report: Take Back the Tap: The Big Business Hustle of Bottled Water:
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/insight/take-back-tap-big-business-hustle-bottled-water
Food & Water Watch champions healthy food and clean water for all. We stand up to corporations that put profits before people, and advocate for a democracy that improves people’s lives and protects our environment.
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/news/nestle-and-others-cashing-us-water-infrastructure-crisis
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Environmental groups that urge us to take back our tap would do well to become involved in environmental health causes. We will not take back our tap by ignoring the toxic chemicals that are being added to our tap by water suppliers, and their effects on our health.
Organizations that don't take on the fight against fluoride and chloramine in our tap water have no business lecturing people to stop buying bottled spring water that does not contain these chemicals. The negative health effects of these chemicals disproportionately affect poor people who have no choice but to use tap water for all their water needs.
Yes, let's take back our tap, but let's start by cleaning up our water supply, starting with taking out the fluoride and chloramine, not by dismissing health concerns and convincing people to drink tap water that contains neurotoxic chemicals.
For information about fluoride see http://fluoridealert.org/
For information about chloramine see http://chloramine.org/
Organizations that don't take on the fight against fluoride and chloramine in our tap water have no business lecturing people to stop buying bottled spring water that does not contain these chemicals. The negative health effects of these chemicals disproportionately affect poor people who have no choice but to use tap water for all their water needs.
Yes, let's take back our tap, but let's start by cleaning up our water supply, starting with taking out the fluoride and chloramine, not by dismissing health concerns and convincing people to drink tap water that contains neurotoxic chemicals.
For information about fluoride see http://fluoridealert.org/
For information about chloramine see http://chloramine.org/
Fluoridation is linked to significant reduction in kids' IQs, bone cancer, hip fractures, dementia, disfiguring fluorosis (especially in minority populations), and a host of other harmful conditions. My article on this topic (an earlier version of which helped convince the county of Sonoma to abandon plans to fluoridate its water) is here. https://medium.com/@jennymllr/what-was-the-halloween-death-smog-disaster-1b43920b40c7
Flouride is in the water all across the US and has been for half a century or more. If it's so incredibly deadly, why hasn't the entire US population just died off or even a substantial portion? Or is that part of the conspiracy, too, the hiding of millions of flouride-related deaths from the public?
I'm not claiming fluoridated water is absolutely wonderful, or has no negative side effects whatsoever, or has never harmed anyone anywhere, but you really do a disservice to your case when you make such grossly overstated claims. There are hundreds of contaminants/pollutants in our daily lives that are far more harmful.
And it comes off as self-centered to take that hyperbolic claim (deadly flouride) and use it as an excuse to completely ignore the serious environmental consequences of bottling water, from the unnecessary taking of a natural resource for private corporate profit to plastic being a petroleum product, from the toxic emissions of plastic to the waste created by billions of plastic water bottles (a million a minute). Lost in the flouride panic is any encouragement to at least recycle those billions of bottles, 90% of which end up in landfills.
It should known that bottled water, despite the marketing pitches intended to fool consumers into believing it's as pure as the driven snow, is often simply tap water itself, perhaps distilled or filtered, perhaps not. In the United States, 24 percent of bottled water sold is either Pepsi’s Aquafina (13 percent of the market) or Coke’s Dasani (11 percent of the market). Both brands are bottled, purified municipal water.
We should fight to improve our shared water infrastructure, as a public good for everyone. If you happen to live in Flint, Michigan, or districts with egregiously polluted tap water, by all means, drink bottled water until the problem is solved. Most everyone else can always filter their own tap water at home if they want, and people probably should, although that won't remove the "deadly flouride."
I'm not claiming fluoridated water is absolutely wonderful, or has no negative side effects whatsoever, or has never harmed anyone anywhere, but you really do a disservice to your case when you make such grossly overstated claims. There are hundreds of contaminants/pollutants in our daily lives that are far more harmful.
And it comes off as self-centered to take that hyperbolic claim (deadly flouride) and use it as an excuse to completely ignore the serious environmental consequences of bottling water, from the unnecessary taking of a natural resource for private corporate profit to plastic being a petroleum product, from the toxic emissions of plastic to the waste created by billions of plastic water bottles (a million a minute). Lost in the flouride panic is any encouragement to at least recycle those billions of bottles, 90% of which end up in landfills.
It should known that bottled water, despite the marketing pitches intended to fool consumers into believing it's as pure as the driven snow, is often simply tap water itself, perhaps distilled or filtered, perhaps not. In the United States, 24 percent of bottled water sold is either Pepsi’s Aquafina (13 percent of the market) or Coke’s Dasani (11 percent of the market). Both brands are bottled, purified municipal water.
We should fight to improve our shared water infrastructure, as a public good for everyone. If you happen to live in Flint, Michigan, or districts with egregiously polluted tap water, by all means, drink bottled water until the problem is solved. Most everyone else can always filter their own tap water at home if they want, and people probably should, although that won't remove the "deadly flouride."
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