Bottled and Sold’: Selling Bottled Water, The Modern Medicine Show by

Peter H. Gleick May 25, 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/bottled-and-sold-selling_b_587882.html

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something
they don’t need.” — Will Rogers

“It may be necessary to fool people for their own good...Average intelligence is
surprisingly low. It is so much more effectively guided by its subconscious impulses and
instincts than by its reason” — John Benson, President of the American Association of
Advertising Agencies

A good advertiser can sell us something we don’t want or need. The truly great advertiser can
convince us to pay a thousand times more than we’re already paying for something we already
have. Like bottled water. My new book, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with
Bottled Water (Island Press, Washington D.C.), offers remarkable examples that show how the
bottled water industry has managed to sell us billions of little packages of water at prices
thousands of times higher than the same stuff that comes from our taps.

The art of advertising is really the art of manipulating images and beliefs with the tools of
illusion, desire, ambiguity, and innuendo for the purpose of selling something. This isn’t
necessarily either good or bad: people with limited time to shop and short attention spans are
often faced with a vast array of competing, indistinguishable products. But when the product is
bottled water, all the special tricks of advertisers are needed. Indeed, bottled water advertisers
don’t try to sell water: they sell youth, health, beauty, romance, status, image, and, of course,
the old standbys, sex and fear.

The history of marketing water with extravagant and questionable claims goes back centuries -
indeed many of the early “medicine show” and “snake oil” salesmen were effectively marketing
water, mixed with “special” ingredients. When disease was widespread, medicine rudimentary,
and doctors rare, quackery and medical mysticism abounded as people desperately searched
for cures to their ailments.

By the turn of the last century, advertising frauds involving food and medicine were so prevalent
that the public demanded that the government step in to protect society. On June 30, 1906,
President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drugs Act - the first national law to
offer rules and regulations to counter the proliferation of ineffective, contaminated, or dangerous
foods and drugs. The law required manufacturers to use honest labels and restricted advertisers
from making unsubstantiated health or medical claims. On July 1, 1906 The New York Times
editorialized that the law was a vital effort to protect “the purity and honesty of the food and
medicines of the people.”

Yet more than a century later, snake oil salesmen and medicine shows are still with us. The best
evidence of this is the vast array of bottled waters being peddled as miracle cures for all kinds of
ailments and modern worries. Fraudulent claims made about the magical benefits of some
bottled waters are the same kind of claims made for the magical benefits of patent medicines in
the early part of the 20th century. What do I choose? The bottled water that promises to make
me slim? Cure my diseases? Make me more attractive to the opposite sex? Or perhaps the

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water whose molecules have been magically rearranged to offer health and emotional
salvation? The gullible consumer can find all of these things.

Vibrationally charged interactive water. Energy-enhanced water infused with luck or love.
Clustered water. Weight-loss “skinny” water. Super-oxygenated water. Rhythm-structured water.
Scalarwave-imprinted, hexagonally-structured water. Positive-energy water. These are just
some of the magical bottled waters pushed to people with real health concerns who don’t know
where else to turn for help. These pseudoscientific claims, documented in Bottled and Sold, can
be found in brochures, health stores, magazines, and especially, on the Internet. And we’re
sucking it up by the gallon.

Where are the federal regulators whose job it is to protect consumers from these kinds of false
claims? Nowhere to be seen. Institutions created to protect the public, like the FDA and FTC,
were never strong to begin with and one of the legacies of the anti-government, anti-regulation,
anti-enforcement movement of the past few decades has been to further weaken consumer
protections to the point that misleading, unproven, and downright false claims are rarely
challenged.

It is time to push back. Government agencies responsible for protecting consumers against
fraudulent and misleading advertising and marketing must actually work to protect consumers.
In the United States, this means that the FTC and the FDA must aggressively move against the
hucksters misleading the public about all sorts of things, including the potential of some bottled
waters to cure their ills. This will require far more serious efforts to crack down on advertising
fraud, especially on the internet. It is long past time for regulators to step in to protect the public
from 21st century snake oil salesmen.

Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water (Book
Review) by Jaymi Heimbuch - November 15, 2011
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-water/bottled-sold-the-story-behind-our-obsession-with-
bottled-water.html

Every second of every day, a thousand Americans buy and drink a plastic bottle of commercially
produced water, adding up to 85 million bottles a day. And for each one consumed in the US,
four more are consumed around the world. The book Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our
Obsession With Bottled Water by Peter Gleick starts out with these statistics. With just a quick
glance it is abundantly clear that bottled water is an issue. But what kind of issue? How does it
affect our health? Our access to water both at home and in public places? Our reliance on oil?
How does it affect the future of our fresh water management both in the US and globally? These
are just a few of the questions Gleick addresses within this fascinating read.

"I believe that bottled water is a symptom of a larger set of issues: the long-term decay of our
public water systems, inequitable access to safe water around the world, our susceptibility to
advertising and marketing, and a society trained from birth the buy, consume, and throw away,"
writes Gleick. Our fear of disease, and our inability to grasp the true cost of convenience are
perhaps the two strongest culprits within the US.

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Fearing Our Tap Water

As far as our worry over the spread of contagions goes, that has strong foundations in history.
As Gleick points out, the history of water-related diseases and pollution has made us suspicious
of public water supplies. However, even as we become better at treating water to reduce
diseases, we also become better at dumping a whole range of pollutants into lakes and rivers.
From source to tap, we have been taught to be wary. The reality is that by the middle of the last
century, water-related diseases dropped by 95% and they still continue to drop. Still, that old
fear of municipal water has given bottled water companies an edge in the market place, playing
off that fear even to the point of untruth.

Winning The Battle Over Health Concerns

The real battle to get us off bottled water will be won in large part by countering these claims
that bottled water is safer with evidence that municipal water actually meets far stricter
regulations for safety and cleanliness, as Gleick points out with study after study in his book.
For example, "While both Fiji Water and Cleveland's tap water met all federal standards, the lab
tests reportedly indicated that Fiji Water contained volatile plastic compounds, 40 times more
bacteria than are founding well-run municipal water systems, and most noticeably, over six
micrograms per liter of arsenic. Cleveland tap water had no measurable arsenic."

Gleick notes, "[F]ederal agencies given oversight over our drinking water have no authority over
bottled water -- a product never anticipated by the drafters of the original federal drinking water
laws." Instead, this is the realm of the FDA, and the FDA regulations only apply to products sold
in interstate commerce, "leaving a vast amount of bottled water that never enters 'interstate
commerce' without consistent protection. By some estimates, this loophole alone exempts 60 to
70 percent of all bottled water from federal regulations." Gleick cites a whole range of problems
with the way bottled water is regulated, making it clear that we should be far more suspicious of
what we're drinking when we pop open a plastic bottle than when we turn on a tap. Even when
problems are found in bottled water, there is typically little or no action to remedy the problem,
either through recalls of the water or though changes in regulations or testing.

Our Disposable Planet

The second part of the battle to get us away from bottled water, is our problem is our
commitment to convenience, even to the denial of the true environmental and economic cost of
that convenience. Gleick notes, "If the only containers available for water were glass or
aluminum cans, I believe that sales of bottled water would never have taken off." But we found
a way to make it more convenient: thin, lightweight plastic. It is far more convenient for us, as
we carry around bottles of water from here to there. But it has proven to be a weighty burden on
the environment.

"Making the plastic for a liter bottle of water actually takes three or four more liters of water itself.
The real problem, though is the energy cost: PET itself is typically made from petroleum. Making
a kilogram of PET, which is enough for around 30 one-liter plastic bottles, takes around 3 liters
of petroleum. More energy is then required to turn that PET into bottles, to filter, ozone, or
otherwise purify the water, to run the bottling machines, and to chill the bottle before use. And
even more substantively, it takes a lot of energy -- almost all in the form of fossil fuels -- to move
the finished product to the place where you buy it… Put all these different pieces together --
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materials, production, and transportation -- and the energy costs of bottled water can be the oil
equivalent of a quarter or more of the volume of the bottle. And this energy cost is a thousand
times larger than the energy required to procure, process, treat, and deliver tap water."
Convenient? Disposable? Cheap? None of these words apply to bottled water once we
understand the true cost. Gleick does an excellent job in Bottled & Sold of laying out the many
details of the problems with convenience.

Circling Back Around to Reality

Let's admit it. For the most part, we're blind to how far advertising has gone to make us drink
bottled water instead of tap -- blind even to the lack of access to tap water in public places like
stadiums and parks. We're simply used to the fact that there is bottled water somewhere, even if
that means free water is nowhere. Yet is access to clean water not a basic human right? The
UN declared it so in 2010. So even on the most basic level, aren't building codes that ignore the
installation of drinking fountains, and regulations that ignore the upkeep of existing fountains,
somehow ignoring a basic human right?

Gleick discusses the notion of us coming into a new age of water management. "The growing
use of bottled water is evidence that the old ways of managing water challenges are putting us
on the wrong side of history. We must do more than just "more of the same" if we are going to
truly address global water problems." While Gleick fears that "this Third Age could consist of
the complete abandonment of our efforts to provide safe public tap water for all in favor of
privately produced and sold bottled water," that fear doesn't seem to be panning out, thankfully.

As Gleick points out, the recent economic crunch has lead many to question the purchases of
bottled water, including local, state and federal governments. Cities and states are now cutting
back on or even banning the purchase of bottled water for meetings, with some electing to
spend monies on public fountains instead. We may indeed come back around to the reality of
the bottled water industry -- that it is a sign of a far deeper problem with the way we manage
water supplies, one that needs to be addressed immediately. The growth of bottled water is
hopefully a temporary blip on the map of how we use water in modern times.

"In the end, the arguments for and against bottled water are more than simply environmental or
economic. The arguments have deeper psychological underpinnings, philosophical and
ideological implications, and social subtexts about public rights versus private goods, the human
right to water, free markets, the appropriate role of governments, and conflicting visions of the
future." Gleick makes a strong, supported, and fair case for for the status of bottled water in our
consumer stream, with thorough research into many aspects of bottled water and municipal
water supplies. Bottled & Sold is a must-read for anyone concerned about the bottled water
industry or who advocates returning to the tap.

Book Review: Costly water by Martin W. Lewis

http://issues.org/27-1/br_lewis-14/

Obsession may not be the best word to describe Americans’ attitude toward bottled water. Few
people are preoccupied with the product; many purchase it without a second thought. But
therein lies the problem. As Peter Gleick amply demonstrates, packaged water comes at a
surprisingly high price. People in the United States purchase nearly nine billion gallons of bottled
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water a year, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a product that is virtually identical to
that which freely flows from their taps. We engage in such senseless behavior, Gleick contends,
because we have bought the claims of advertisers and marketers. Large beverage corporations
spend heavily to disparage public water supplies and to tout, often misleadingly, their own
products.

Many of the campaigns against tap water and in favor of the bottled alternative are both
amusing and outrageous. As Gleick outlines, Coca-Cola, owner of the Dasani brand, once
developed a “six-step program” to help the Olive Garden Restaurant chain reduce what they call
“tap water incidents”: unprofitable episodes of customers ordering free refreshment. The very
names of bottled brands can appear comical when juxtaposed with the source of their water:
Arctic Wolf Spring water is actually bottled in New Jersey and Arctic Spring in Florida. And
although the water sold under the Alaska Premium Glacier brand does indeed come from
Alaska, it flows out of Pipe 111241 of the Juneau municipal water system. More humorous still
are claims made by marketers of pseudo-scientifically enhanced water. Penta Water, for
example, is supposedly “restructured … through molecular redefinition.” Religiously inspired
water quackery comes in for well-deserved mockery. The makers of Kabbalah Water, plugged
by both Madonna and Britney Spears, allege that “because of its unique crystalline structure and
fractal design, [our product] is an excellent information transmitter.”

Although only a few minor companies make claims as outrageous as those from Kabbalah,
many firms assert that their products are safer and more wholesome than public tap water. Tap
water is easy to malign, Gleick shows, both because it was historically dangerous and because
contamination incidents do occur. But municipal waterworks are closely regulated by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which sets rigorous rules for a wide variety of
impurities and acts quickly when thresholds are passed. Bottled water, in contrast, is less
stringently overseen by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which sets lower standards for
key contaminants such as coliform bacteria. And although the FDA does restrict some
pollutants, such as lead, more stringently than the EPA, such regulations apply only to bottled
water marketed across state lines. FDA inspections of major bottling plants, moreover, have
revealed some significant health violations. Although it required sleuthing, Gleick was able to
uncover nearly 100 incidents in which bottles had to be recalled. It is difficult to resist the
author’s conclusion that bottled water, overall, is not safer than tap water.

Even if bottled water has no health advantages over tap water, it might still taste better, as its
purveyors claim. Many of the large bottlers begin with municipal water, which they subject to
additional filtration and other methods of supposed purification. Such procedures, however,
remove the minerals that give a desirable taste. As a result, additives are necessary. Coca-
Cola, Gleick reveals, “adds a carefully prepared mix of minerals … back into the water to create
a finished product with a standardized taste…. Thus, Dasani from San Leandro is virtually
indistinguishable from Dasani from Detroit.” But is the resulting product actually preferred by
consumers? Numerous surveys show that most people cannot tell the difference between the
various brands or between bottled water and tap water from high-quality municipal systems.
One blind taste test actually showed that the most expensive water turned out to be the one
people liked least, Gleick writes.

At first glance, spring water is a more honest product than reprocessed tap water. Spring water
is typically bottled with little treatment and is thus marketed as a “natural” product. But natural
filtration through aquifers does not necessarily remove all pathogenic organisms. One study
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found Giardia and Cryptosporidium in 20% of U.S. springs. As a result, Gleick argues, there are
good reasons to be “especially concerned about the safety of spring waters.” Equally worrisome
are the effects of the industry on spring-dependent ecosystems. In the arid southwest, rare
oasis environments have been diminished by gargantuan bottling plants. Even in the more
humid parts of the country, aquifers have dropped, sometimes desiccating wetlands.

Environmental repercussions

The environmental damage caused by bottled water is by no means limited to groundwater

depletion. The manufacturing and distribution of plastic bottles are energy-intensive, consuming
the equivalent of between 100 and 160 million barrels of oil in 2007, Gleick says. Bottled water
also generates a massive stream of plastic waste. The industry has responded to this criticism
by reducing the plastic content of its bottles, by stressing recycling, and by experimenting with
biodegradable containers. Such approaches, Gleick argues, may be helpful but are ultimately
inadequate. So-called biode grad able bottles often degrade poorly and may end up
contaminating the recycling stream. Bottling and trucking water, Gleick says, is simply much
more expensive and environmentally degrading than transporting water in pipelines.

As the hidden and not-so-hidden costs of bottled water gradually come to light, a reaction
against the industry has gathered strength. Cities such as San Francisco have banned
municipal purchases, and a number of prominent restaurants no longer carry the product,
serving plain and carbonated tap water instead. Citizens’ groups have sued springwater firms
for depleting aquifers and in several instances have shut down existing and proposed
waterworks. In 2008, the sales of bottled water in the United States declined for the first time.
Although industry spokespeople attributed the drop to the recession, the public awareness
campaign spearheaded by writers such as Gleick seems to be having an impact.

The bottled water industry is fighting back with intensified lobbying efforts, advertising
campaigns, and lawsuit threats. A number of firms now trumpet their environmental
responsibility. Such an approach, however, can amount to little more than “greenwashing,” with
minimal actions undertaken to support grandiose claims. Fiji Water, which claims carbon
neutrality, comes in for special scorn, because it ships most of its bottles halfway around the
world. Still, Gleick is cautiously supportive of several smaller, self-proclaimed “ethical”
companies. In particular, he cites Ethos Water, which has pledged to give 50% of its profits to
organizations supporting water and sanitation projects in developing countries.

The lure of convenience

Consumers buy bottled water, Gleick writes, for four main reasons: safety, taste, style, and
convenience. He debunks the first three of these rationales with ample evidence and wit. But he
devotes much less attention to the issue of convenience, which is not so easily dismissed. On
this score, the campaign against bottled water may face more intractable obstacles than the
author realizes.

In a society as affluent as the United States, an individual bottle of water is trivially cheap for
many consumers, regardless of the overall costs to the environment. And if the water in the
bottle is no better than what comes out of the tap, at least it will be cold when purchased. In
setting out on a trip, whether driving across the countryside or strolling through a city, few
people think to pack their own sink water, and fewer still take the trouble to add ice and use an
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insulated container. In the United States, with its mobile lifestyle and penchant for cold
beverages, bottled water is often much more convenient than tap water.

Such thoughtless convenience can be partially addressed through education about hidden
costs, which is exactly what Gleick provides in Bottled and Sold. Environmentally conscious
consumers, a growing cohort, will often forgo ease in the interest of sustainability. But many
others will opt for expediency over responsibility every time. Educational efforts against
groundless consumer behavior also confront intrinsic human irrationality. As behavioral
economists have shown, people typically think more highly of goods that they have purchased
than they do of identical products that they have acquired for free. Beverage corporations may
take advantage of such predictably irrational behavior, but they cannot be blamed for creating it.

Gleick argues that another way to reduce our dependence on bottled water is to invest more
extensively in public supplies. High-quality water flowing at low cost through municipal pipelines
will dissuade some from purchasing bottles. The issue of convenience, moreover, can be
partially addressed by public water fountains. But in many areas, new fountains are no longer
being installed and existing ones are not being maintained. Major public facilities, including
sports stadiums, have been erected with no water outlets, effectively forcing spectators to
purchase bottles. If we are to overcome our dependence on bottled water, Gleick argues, we
must restore the public spout.

But as the author recognizes, merely increasing the number of fountains would not be adequate.
Many people demand cold water of the highest quality and distrust any dispenser on which
another person’s lips may once have rested. Gleick thus advocates a technological fix,
endorsing modern “hydration stations” that include filters, coolers, variable stream heights, and
more. Such top-of-the-line water fountains can be costly to manufacture and install and require
maintenance and power. We are a long way, in other words, from virtually free public tap water.
But Gleick tends to downplay issues of cost when discussing projects that he supports. Thus, on
one page he castigates the state government of Connecticut for spending $500,000 annually on
bottled water, then praises Minneapolis on the next for devoting the same sum to construct a
mere 10 public fountains. Environmental auditing would be beneficial here, comparing all the
costs of bottled water to those of hydration stations. I suspect that the latter would come out well
ahead, but I would like to see the accounting.

A path forward

In the end, Gleick calls for a “soft path for water,” one emphasizing incentives for efficient water
use, appropriate regulatory approaches, and expanded public participation in decisionmaking, in
addition to expanding and renovating public water delivery systems. Unmentioned is the fact
that the hydrological engineering processes and facilities necessary to provide universally high-
quality drinking water are not necessarily “soft” in the environmental sense of the term. In many
farm regions of the United States, tap water, whether derived from wells or municipal systems,
is contaminated with nitrates and other agricultural chemicals. To provide the entire country with
public water as wholesome as that of New York City or San Francisco, large dams would have
to be built, rivers partially diverted, and vast new pipeline networks constructed. San Francisco’s
municipal water, much touted by Gleick, flows from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite
National Park, which is widely regarded as an environmental abomination. When Gleick urges
people to adopt a “drink local philosophy,” my doubts mount. Not only would Los Angeles need
to shed most of its population, but even Gleick’s home city of Berkeley would not be able to
7
maintain itself. In Berkeley and neighboring East Bay cities, local water supplies proved
inadequate as far back as 1923, leading to the damming of the Mokelumne River in the Sierra
Nevada and the construction of yet another trans-state pipeline.

If Gleick underplays the costs entailed by public water systems, he also occasionally
exaggerates the benefits of abandoning the bottle. Springwater extraction facilities can indeed
deplete aquifers, but at the national and global scales the damage that they cause is trivial
compared with that of agriculture. Irrigated faming in arid environments destroys vast
ecosystems—the Aral Sea is a good example—whereas water bottlers merely threaten local
habitats. Gleick dreams of a day when aquatic ecosystems around the world are restored, but
for that to happen we must expand our scope well beyond that of the bottled water industry.

The objections raised above do not in any way discredit Gleick’s basic thesis. The evidence that
he marshals convinces me that our current level of reliance on bottled water is economically
senseless and environmentally destructive and that enhanced investments in public facilities
would be beneficial. Despite his occasional hyperbole, Gleick’s overall position is tempered and
reasonable. He has no desire to enact any bans, and he does see a place, if a minor one, for
bottled water. If he sometimes avoids difficult discussions of inevitable tradeoffs, such omissions
are understandable. A more comprehensive and balanced account would not appeal to a large
audience; constantly qualifying one’s arguments is a poor strategy for selling books. But to
convince skeptics, the more dispassionate approach of environmental economics, which tallies
costs and benefits, hidden and overt, on both sides of any issue at hand, has much to
recommend it.

Martin W. Lewis (mwlewis@stanford.edu) is a senior lecturer at Stanford University and

the author of Green Delusions: A Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism.
He blogs at Geocurrents.info.
‘

C-Span Video – 6/4/2010 (1:12 hour lecture given by with Gleick)

http://www.c-span.org/video/?294515-1/book-discussion-bottled-sold

Fresh Air Interview

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833795

National Geographic Interview (Written Transcript Only)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100613-bottled-water-peter-gleick/

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Biography

Dr. Peter H. Gleick is co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in
Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California. His research and writing
address the critical connections between water and human health, the hydrologic impacts of
climate change, sustainable water use, privatization and globalization, and international conflicts
over water resources.

Dr. Gleick is an internationally recognized water expert and was named a MacArthur Fellow in
October 2003 for his work. In 2001, Gleick was dubbed a "visionary on the environment" by the
British Broadcasting Corporation. In 1999, Gleick was elected an Academician of the
International Water Academy, in Oslo, Norway and in 2006, he was elected to the National
Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. In 2008, Wired Magazine named him "one of 15
people the next President should listen to."

Gleick received a B.S. from Yale University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of
California, Berkeley. He serves on the boards of numerous journals and organizations, and is
the author of many scientific papers and nine books, including the biennial water report, "The
World's Water," "Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water," and "A
Twenty-First Century U.S. Water Policy" (released August 2012).

http://pacinst.org/issues/sustainable-water-management-local-to-global/bottled-water/