op-ed Bottled water is bottled worthless

Author: Daniel Streitfeld

Reading the letters page in the Campus last week, I was slightly bemused to see two consecutive letters by unfamiliar men named Brian Flaherty and Kevin Keane. If you're desperately trying to remember if those are the two stoners from your French Lit class, I assure you they are not. They are not students at all (nor alumni, faculty or staff) but are representatives of Nestle Waters North America and the American Beverage Association, respectively.

They both published presumably prepackaged statements ('press releases' would be a more appropriate term) in response to Rachael Jennings's Oct. 18 piece about the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, an effort spearheaded by senior Jen Foth to reduce the use of bottled water on campus.

I suspect from the fact that no specific references whatsoever were made to the arguments of Jennings's piece that neither of the men even bothered to read the article, much less get to the bottom of the issues it discussed. In all honesty, while reading the letters I was reminded of the hilarious cinematic satire "Thank You for Smoking" and the sleaze-bag publicist characters from the tobacco, cigarette and alcohol industries.

Unfortunately in this case, though, the two men are not actors, but paid representatives from the beverage industry - paid, meaning that their very livelihoods depend on the success or failure of bottled water in America. This fact made me very a priori suspicious of their intents - after all, if we as a college (or society at large) are trying to make a decision that affects all of us, why would we put much emphasis on the highly biased opinions of two intensely affected players?

Still, though, I decided it was only fair to actually read the letters, off-put as I was by the 'so-unfunny-you-make-Bob-Saget-sound-funny' opening line of Mr. Keane's letter - "[t]he recent backlash against bottled water simply doesn't hold water"-har har!

Both men rave about the environmental steps that the industry has taken as of late - developing "Eco-Shape" (less material intensive) bottles, increasing recycling and becoming more energy efficient. While I don't doubt any of these advances, the fundamental point is that bottled water usage comes down to a question of priorities.

While I won't go through all of the detailed figures here (Ms. Jennings has already done so), bottled water is an extraneous and unnecessary waste in many respects - plastic and water are involved in creation of the bottles, fuel and other resources as used to ship/truck the product, many of the bottles (70-80 percent) end up in landfills, and even those bottles that are eventually recycled incur energy costs via their remolding/repackaging.

All of this waste in terms of both carbon emissions and natural resources when effectively 100 percent of Americans have access (via preexisting infrastructure) to clean, sanitary, tasteless water (and if it's not tasteless then you can always invest $40 in a Brita water filter).

Why do we need such a product then? We didn't a few decades ago. The two men do a great job of pandering to our often lazy and narcissist instincts - bottled water is "portable," helps you "[stay] hydrated throughout the day" and is perfect for our "on-the-go" society. Then again, so is a refillable Nalgene or other reusable container filled with eminently available tap water, all without any of the environmental costs associated with bottled water.

Bottled water has, I would argue, become the ultimate symbol of the evil underside of our consumerist culture. A seemingly innocent product that is, alas, healthy for you (well, except for the fact that much bottled water, such as Dasani, has undergone reverse osmosis, a process Mr. Keane lauds highly, which removes the tooth-protecting fluoride found in good ol' tap water) is also completely unnecessary and wasteful. It's something we have become programmed to think we need, when in reality it is simply a particularly nasty display of our extreme resource misuse when contrasted with real water scarcity issues across the globe.

If, as a society, we are going to act on our awareness of the necessity of responsible natural resource usage and carbon emissions reduction, I for one would much rather make the (extremely minor) sacrifice of foregoing bottled water as opposed to (or at least before) sacrificing something more substantial, such as taking fewer airplane flights or altering my diet to include less meat.

As I have put forth, I think that in the case of bottled water we have become more attached to the idea of the thing as opposed to the actual product itself, in as much as it only makes sense to re-evaluate the benefits it offers us when we take into account the negative externalities its consumption entails. So the next time you have that hankering to drink a bottle of water from somewhere exotic like, oh, I don't know, Fiji, please, let's just leave it for the Fijians - your tap works just fine.

Daniel Streitfeld '08 is from Dallas, Texas.