Is the Bottled Water Trend Spinning Out?

For those of us who’ve devoted a lot of time and thought to battling the absurdly wasteful and disastrously destructive bottled water industry, last week‚ news brought glad tidings.

Firstly, sales of bottled water are down. (Not surprising, given that sales of everything are down, but still, as Wenonah Hauter pointed out in the Washington Post, it‚ great news, and some credit should go where it‚ due.) Second, an independent journalist writing for Mother Jones was arrested and threatened with some less-than-pleasant personal consequences for digging up dirt on Fiji Water. That’s not the good news; the good news is, she got away, and her article brings some shocking revelations about the world‚ most glamorous bottled water brand.

While the former bit of news , the expected long-term crash of the bottled water market, is probably the more important bit, the latter, an exposé of exactly why the spendy artesian eco-water in the square bottle is so insidiously damaging, offers an intriguing look at the evils lurking behind the bottle and the brand.

In digging up the dirt on Fiji, the article‚ author, Anna Lenzer, shows us an extreme example of what‚ wrong with bottled water in general, the plastic, the transportation costs, the grandiose and misguided health claims, the derision of public water (which happens to be not only vastly cheaper and better regulated, but the very basis of public health in the industrialized world). These are all problems that Food & Water Watch has focused on relentlessly in our Take Back the Tap Campaign.

But more than this, we see exposed the insidious power of branding itself. As another investigative journalist, Naomi Klein, pointed out in her book No Logo, the 1990s ushered in a trend in corporate marketing where the brand doesn’t sell the product, but the product sells the brand. Fiji water exemplifies this approach, where the combined mass hallucination of star-power and eco-bling have made a particular brand of water, water, mind you, the very basis of life, of which we are each and all composed, a commercial sensation. Not just a commodity, but a must-have, one of the “Top 10 Things Young Hollywood Can’t Get Through the Day Without.” Come on, people.

When FWW and other consumer and environmental groups deride the practices that we call greenwashing, it is not only because we cant stand hypocrisy; it is because there are real issues at stake. When a corporation like Fiji pretends toward an environmental ethic while shipping bottles of water across the ocean and failing even to pay taxes to the impoverished country whose resources they are selling off , and when this pretense wins them ever-increasing cultural caché and market-share, they must be called out.

The truth is that while Fiji water has apparently engaged in some very unsavory activity, such is the way of the bottled water and beverage industry in general. Whether it‚ Nestlé in Cascade Locks, Coca-Cola in Chiapas, Mexico or Plachimada, India, or Fiji in the South Seas, bottled water is an extractive industry, by nature taking more than it gives back. There is nothing green about it, except, as we say, the profits.