The answer is not to provide bottled water for everybody. They spend the money necessary to buy safe water, but that leaves out of the equation billions of people who can’t afford to buy bottled water and who don’t have access to safe tap water. In places where there is no acceptably clean tap water, the wealthier parts of communities buy bottled water. The problem is that it’s an alternative only for the rich. Either there is no tap water because governments or communities have failed to meet their basic human needs for water, they’ve failed to provide safe, reliable tap water for people, and bottled water is the only alternative. I would be the first to acknowledge, and this book clearly acknowledges, that there are parts of the planet where you don’t want to drink the tap water. Gleick: Bottled water is a piece, only a piece, of the world’s water problems. For all of these reasons, I think sales of bottled water have exploded, and we’ve become increasingly reliant on what used to be a pretty odd thing to think about, that is commercially packaged pieces of plastic holding a little bit of water.ĭr. Bottled water has become pretty ubiquitous, and yet our water fountains are disappearing. Think about where you are at any given moment of the day, and you can probably find somebody selling bottled water within a few tens or hundreds of feet, in a vending machine or a 7-11 or some other convenience store. The fourth reasons is it’s increasingly hard to find tap water. A third is that we’re marketed, we’re bombarded with advertising about how this or that brand of bottled water will make us popular or make us more stylish or make us skinnier or sexier or all of the tools of marketing are being used to push bottled water on to consumers. For that reason, people choose to buy bottled water. In some places, tap water doesn’t taste very good. A second is people sometimes don’t like the taste of their tap water, and that’s a legitimate concern. That’s one reason why people buy bottled water. So people are being made to fear their tap water. I do believe there’s war on tap water, a war being fought by commercial interests who would much rather sell us a very expensive commercial product than have us simply rely on what we’ve always relied on for more than a century now, that is the water coming out of our taps. Gleick: I think there are four principle reasons why people buy bottled water. What this book says is if we really don’t like the idea of bottled water, we better think about why people buy this bottled water and tackle those problems themselves.ĭr. There’s a whole campaign to market and advertise water in a commercial sense to us to make us think, well, you know what, to be sexier, to be skinnier, to be more popular, we have to buy this or that brand of bottled water. There are places where we just can’t get water conveniently because our water fountains are disappearing one by one. There are places where people don’t like the taste of their tap water or they fear the quality of their tap water. All of a sudden we understand that there’s a war on tap water by commercial interests. Why do we buy bottled water? When we ask that question, we come up with a different set of issues. What we have to ask ourselves is why do people drink bottled water, when for the most part in a country like the United States and many other parts of the world, tap water is incredibly available and cheap and high quality. There are plenty of people who think that we should just get rid of bottled water, that we should ban bottled water, but that’s not what this book argues. The big story is the state of the world’s water as a whole and why bottled water has become an important component of that. Instead, it’s time to take a hard look at the bigger picture to understand why we buy bottled water so as to define alternatives for the future.ĭr. But banning the bottle isn’t the solution, Gleick says. Bottled water is usually readily available, and some companies have launched fear campaigns against the tap, while others produce misleading advertising. Why do people buy billions of gallons of expensive bottled water in the U.S., a country where most of the tap water is cheap and extremely high quality? Some consumers don’t like the taste of their tap water. There’s a war going on over what kind of water you drink–bottling companies have waged a campaign against tap water and it’s paying off, according to Pacific Institute President and MacArthur Fellow Peter Gleick. Today’s program is underwritten by Traverse Internet Law, tech savvy lawyers, representing internet and technology companies. These are experts working in journalism, science, communication design, and water. Welcome to Circle of Blue Radio’s Series 5 in 15, where we’re asking global thought leaders five questions in 15 minutes, more or less.
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