Jul 30, 2007 0
Are you thirsty?
A great read about the economics of bottled water comes from a Fast Company article this month. Here are some of the highlights:
- $15 billion will be spent on bottled water in 2006
- We drink a billion bottles of water every week
- 1 in 6 people in the world have no dependable, safe drinking water
- The entire bottled-water business today is half the size of the carbonated beverage industry yet there marketing budget is only 15% of what the carbonated beverage industry spends.
- San Francisco’s municipal water comes from Yosemite National Park. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle for once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35 (the cost of the Evian). Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
- Aquafina (Pepsi) and Dasani (Coke) make up about 24% of the bottled water market. Both are simply purified municipal water.
- American’s went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year. Made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, water bottles are totally recyclable. Our current recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch 38 billion water bottles every year into landfills (more than $1 billion worth of plastic).
It’s interesting to note how pervasive the water bottle has become in our culture. Growing up, I can never remember carrying around any kind of beverage. At school, if I was thirsty, I’d use the water fountain. Now, I can’t seem to go anywhere without my ice-filled Camelbak water bottle (of course, I do live in Phoenix compared to growing up in Pittsburgh). I wonder how the impact of a simple convenience: the automobile’s cup holder helped make beverages something that needed to be with us at all times. Or is it just the nature of our culture today?