The Life of Bottled Water: A Matter of Awareness and Education

Summertime is heating up in Portland and across the state! As more Oregonians are getting out and enjoying the sunshine and all kinds of outdoor athletic activities, from kayaking to mountain climbing, CUB is raising awareness of the critical role that reusable containers play in environmental stewardship. You can join in by visiting our shop to purchase your very own CUB water bottle. BPA-free and equipped with a fastening clip and customizable lid attachments, this bottle holds 20oz of liquid and is great for on-the-go travel. Get yours today!

Interested in learning more about the impact of single-use plastic water bottles? Read on! What follows is a review of the book Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water, by Gay Hawkins, Emily Potter, and Kane Race (2015, MIT Press).

Written by professors at three different Australian universities, Plastic Water’s academic writing style can be dense, but its international focus is interesting. Initial chapters highlight how the development of PET plastic facilitated the boom in bottled water and how “hydration science” set the stage for marketing bottled water with overly emphatic claims of the need to drink water. These topics, though, are similarly covered in more readable fashion in Bottlemania by Elizabeth Royte and Bottled and Sold by Peter H. Gleick.

Where Plastic Water stands out is its international focus. It includes detailed discussions of the role of bottled water in communities where safe drinking water is unreliable with stories from Bangkok, Thailand, Chennai, India, and Hanoi in Vietnam. The Hanoi discussion is particularly interesting since it highlights how recycling plastic from bottled water has led to “plastic villages.” At these sites residents focus on collecting bottles and other plastics, breaking them up into “reconstituted raw” materials that are then used to produce new plastic products.

Plastic Water’s discussion of ethical water and campaigns against bottled waters include an example from the United States, but primarily focuses on efforts in Australia and Canada. His first example is One Water in Australia that strives to transform bottled water from a purely commercial enterprise to a market focused on social good since the company contributes money for water projections in Africa and Asia.

Mount Franklin is an Australian water company owned by Coca-Cola that frequently forms marketing partnerships with nonprofits. A major example was a Pink Lids initiative where the bottled water had pink bottle caps during Breast Cancer Awareness month with a pitch for customers to leave positive messages of support to breast cancer patients and survivors. The Australian National Breast Cancer Foundation received a $1 donation for each message received while the company got consumer contact information. In other words, Mount Franklin was still selling bottled water but also provided a way for customers to support a good cause.

In Canada, the Inside the Bottle campaign by the Polaris Institute tied the growth in the bottled water industry to global concerns about safe and secure water supplies. Making these connections reflects the origins of the Polaris Institute in fighting free trade agreements and how that social activism broadened to a general movement against “corporate driven globalization.”  The Inside the Bottle campaign included promotion of tap water. Another Australian effort, the Do Something campaign, pushed for a return to supplying tap water in public fountains. This group saw bottled water as a menace and viewed water fountains as a “public thing” that embodied important democratic values.

For more information on this subject, check out the CUB review of Bottlemania, and watch our blog for future updates!

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