Bottled Water: Our Dirty Obsession

Bottled Water: Our Dirty Obsession Bottled water has a kind of a health halo in our society. It is considered a substance that is intrinsically 'good for you' because water is a necessity for us to live. Consumers rationalize: what could be wrong with apparently clean, pure bottled water? But according to environmentalist authors such as Cynthia Barnett and Peter H. Gleick, the bottled water industry is causing devastation to the environment and does not even provide the benefits to the consumers that the purchasers desire in the short-term.

The dark and dirty secrets behind bottled water are easy to overlook. Barnett demands that consumers give equal scrutiny to the environmental effects of the bottled water industry as they do the meat and drug industries which have garnered the lion's share of recent negative press; Gleick demands that users evaluate the health claims of the industry with the same level of scrutiny they would drugs and other pharmaceutical products.

In her essay "Business in a Bottle" from her book Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., Cynthia Barnett portrays a world in which the natural environment is being sacrificed to humanity's artificially created appetite for bottled water. Barnett specifically uses Florida as a microcosm for analyzing this larger issue. Her focus is upon the Florida wetlands.

These areas are in a state of crisis, as rivers and lakes are beginning to dry up thanks to our desire for water, although she states that other regions have also been affected. "Lower water tables, saltwater intrusion, and a disruption of the habitat for fish and other wildlife" are all the symptoms of a dependence on bottled water (Barnett 142). Florida is particularly attractive to developers because of the lack of state regulation. "Bottling companies also get little oversight in Florida.

The Division of Food Safety, the state agency that monitors water companies, does some testing of bottled water to make sure it is safe and inspects bottling facilities for sanitation" but that is all (Barnett 130). The main requirement in Florida is that the water comes from an approved source, and such approval is easily given in a region which is hungry for industrial development and where jobs are scarce. Big water is big business.

The politicians "love" the bottled water industry and are reluctant to embark upon serious regulatory efforts: also, the environmental conditions which can result in danger to the water supply are often quite complex to understand while the immediate economic implications of regulating the industry are not (Barnett 131). Some states were initially resistant to the onslaught of the industry; Florida was not and has profited mightily in the short-term but has paid a high environmental price.

Bottled water is also regulated by the federal government but this is given far lower priority than regulating foods and other types of beverages which are seen as posing a greater intrinsic risk of contamination. Once again, the philosophy is 'how bad could water be?' The marketing of bottled water, despite the fact that technically the bottlers cannot make claims that it is spring water when the bottles are groundwater, create an image of purity with pictures of pristine mountains on the front.

In fact, this so-called purified water is rarely healthier or freer than toxins than actual tap water and in blind taste tests people cannot tell the difference between either. However, there is the perception that tap water 'tastes funny' and this drives the industry in its marketing of a product that Barnett views a kind of modern form of patent medicine -- it is at best needlessly expensive and harmless to the drinker, at worst destructive to the ecosystem (Barnett 139).

In fact, there is a kind of circular irony -- the more bottlers are allowed to exploit the environment, the worse the press about water quality and the more people are inclined to purchase bottled water, thus raising the sales of the industry that is complicit in such destruction.

Companies are not even charged for "the groundwater from which they profit" (Barnett 142) The lack of concern amongst the water-drinking public may have to do with water's ubiquity -- every day we ignore the tap near our kitchen sink, buy bottled water, and carelessly discard that water because we believe the bottles are recycled.

And, as Peter Gleick argues in his essay "Selling bottled water: The modern medicine show" from Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, people are bombarded with advertisements for the health claims of bottled water so consistently, the effect is very similar to how people react to prescription drug advertisements -- suddenly, subliminally, they sense that they have a 'condition' (i.e., the tap water tastes funny) that never occurred in the first place (Gleick 109).

Gleik notes how the public has even been convinced by brands such as Evian that the water is a "natural source of youth" (Gleick 110). Skinny water, ionized water, alkalized water: people understand very little about these claims but assume because they sound scientific they must be true (Gleick 114). And once again, the FDA is more interested in seemingly.