Which Frenchman Thought of This?
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Opinion
May 1, 2006
Bottled water has always been a puzzle to me. Who came up with this idea? Why do Americans pay the equivalent of about $8 a gallon for something they can usually get for free down the hallway? How can a 12-oz. bottle of plain old water cost the same as or more than a Pepsi?
Can you envision that first entrepreneur approaching a group of investors or his local bank with his idea to take water, put it into 12-oz. plastic bottles, and sell it for $1 or more? Surely some thought he was nuts. But others were apparently smarter than me.
The first bottled water, at least as I recall, was all "natural spring" water or fresh from a "mountain stream." But, as a recent report revealed, much of the bottled water on the market today comes "straight out of the municipal water supply of Detroit."
What spurs me to get on this soapbox was an article I came across this week.
Some government office called the Natural Resources Defense Council studied every brand of bottled water they could find. Their tests showed that 22 percent of them did not meet the minimum standards for municipal tap water. It seems there are federal regulations that allow bottled water "to contain some contamination by E. coli, or fecal coliform, and don't require disinfection for cryptosporidium or giardi." Although few of us can explain just what those things are, I'd bet we all agree they don't sound good.
Americans consumed almost 26 billion liters of bottled water in 2005. There was also an article recently about gas prices that put part of the blame for high prices on bottled water. The resources needed to produce the plastic bottles for those 26 billion liters (not to mention the electrical power to fill them and the gasoline to distribute them) requires over 1.5 million barrels of oil, enough to fuel about 100,000 cars for a year.
Americans are not alone. In fact, we are somewhat behind many parts of the world in our bottled water consumption. This unexplainable phenomenon is not limited to our American shores.
Europeans are, at least by some accounts, the world leaders in per capita bottled water consumption. Which just proves my point. If the French think it's so cool, how good of an idea can it be?
by MARK MILLER
