How the Bottled Water Industry Created a Convenient Scourge
An immensely profitable industry, but at what cost?
Every year since 2016, the #1 pre-packaged beverage in America hasn’t been soda or beer or coffee. It’s been water— almost 1/4 of our beverage purchases are for bottles of something that is available at basically no cost from faucets and fountains in every building in the country.
How you look at this depends on your relationship with bottled water. Perhaps you work in the beverage industry and see a profit center — selling filtered tap water at a massive markup is almost too good to be true. Perhaps you find bottled water to be a convenient and safe necessity of modern life.
Perhaps you look at the millions of tons of plastic in landfills and see an environmental disaster in the making. Whatever your perspective, bottled water is a phenomenon, the result of clever marketing and the public’s willingness to spend money for dubiously healthy products.
The First Wave
Bottled water isn’t really a new industry. It’s more accurate to say that it was a business that was lucrative in the 19th century, faded for decades, and found new life in the ’80s and ’90s. The original, 19th-century bottled water industry centered around people’s concerns about their health. The earliest bottled water businesses distributed water from mineral springs, claiming that the minerals in the water could cure a host of illnesses.
Resorts like Saratoga Springs in New York and Poland Spring in Maine convinced people that bathing in their waters would improve their health. If you couldn’t afford a trip to the spa, you could still buy bottles of the stuff and drink it. On the back of these claims, Saratoga Springs was selling seven million bottles a year by 1856. Of course, it wasn’t long before there were fakes. Enterprising businessmen began to create fake spring water, infusing it with carbon dioxide bubbles to mimic spring water’s effervescence.
While mineral water appealed to consumers’ desire to get healthier, other bottled water…