Message in a Bottle

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE:
What is Bottled Water Saying to You?



It seems the very definition of ironic: tucked on my local natural food Co-op shelves between those "shop local" signs are plastic-shrink-wrapped cases of plastic bottles from, of all places, Fiji. No matter which of the hotly-argued definitions of "local" you happen to embrace, Fiji will not fall within your adopted parameters, unless you take a galactic-scale approach. Then again, neither do Spain or Italy, the source of, say, almonds or olive oil, so what is it that Fiji water is shouting at me that so catches my attention?

Water, Water Everywhere

The first distinction I make is that, no matter which local definition you apply, we simply don’t grow almonds or olives here. That means to acquire almonds and olives, we trade with other places. There has always been such trade, as archaeological evidence of distant food products and other items in the earliest human settlements attests. Today that trade is less likely to be direct item-for-item: we don’t take our maple syrup to Spain and barter it for olive oil. Instead we use money. Many of us also do bring back food products from places outside our local region when we travel: I always come back from Boston with canolis from Mike’s pastry in the old North End, for example, or seafood from Connecticut or New Jersey– we don’t have Mike’s pastry, or locally fresh-caught seafood, in Vermont. (Okay, you caught me, I’m pushing my example on the canolis; we certainly have the ability to make a canoli here in Vermont, and there are bakeries that do it, it’s just, well... it’s not the same thing.)

Water, on the other hand, we have here in abundance. In nearly as much an abundance as, say, tomatoes or zucchini in late August. Unlike a large percentage of people in the world, we do not live in a desert. We do not live in the kind of city where the drinking water pipes and open sewer ditches are one and the same. We do not live on an island or coastal plain where desalinization plants are required to make water drinkable. Many of us have town water, treated, tested, and certified as appropriate for human consumption. Many of us live near springs of fresh mountain water. Others of us have wells, that we have tested, and are mostly quite good, though chemical problems do occasionally require addressing and correcting or filtration.

So why are we buying little plastic bottles of water from anywhere at all, much less Fiji? The answer is we may well be simply buying a message – a marketing message aimed at convincing us that bottled water is better. But defining "better" can be even more controversial than defining "local."

What’s In –and Behind– that Bottle?

In the United States, tap water is regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The standards are extremely strict – so strict that many people complain their tap water is flat, stripped of all taste personality, de-oxygenated, and over-chlorinated (then there’s the question of drinking flouride, another hot topic for dinner-table debate).

Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – and the standards are much more lenient. Bottled water suppliers are not required to test their water for a whole host of nasty critters, compounds, and chemicals. The primary regulations relate to labeling: Bottled water suppliers do have to tell you accurately where the water in the bottle comes from. Most that bottled water comes simply from someone else’s tap, or from a spring. FIJI water, and a few others on the market, come from artesian wells, which are water pockets deep underground, usually quite free from any man-made pollutants (though often with a heavy mineral content, which may or may not be desireable for your tastebuds or healthy for you body depending on any medical concerns you may have). An interesting, mostly unanswered question is whether chemicals from the plastic bottles leach into the otherwise-pure water contained in them over time. Many bottled-water-drinkers report a "plasticky" taste, but it’s unclear whether that’s from the smell of the rim of the bottle under your nose, or whether the water has developed a perceptible flavor.

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, bottled water sells over $11 billion of product per year. The Pacific Institute reports in its extensive Wikipedia article on the subject that Americans purchase over 28 billion water bottles per year, using about 17 million barrels of oil a year to produce, and–more irony–something like 3 to 6 liters of water used in manufacturing each 1 liter plastic bottle. The vast majority of these bottles wind up in the landfill.
Then comes shipping: Pacific Institute further estimates that 250g of CO2 is released for each bottle of FIJI water transported to the U.S.: 93g manufacturing the plastic bottle in China, 4g transporting the empty bottle to Fiji, then 153g for shipping the full bottle to the U.S. Of course, even locally-bottled water will have some of these same costs, especially if the empty bottles are manufactured on the other side of the globe before filling up in Poland Spring or Saratoga or wherever.

On the other side, the FIJI water website reports that the bottling company has teamed up with Conservation International to become a "carbon negative" product by preserving a piece of Fiji rainforest. I find the claim confusing; first, it would need to be one heck of a big rainforest; and second, preserving what’s already there is obviously a help, but it doesn’t negate an added carbon impact, in only holds the present status quo. The company, however, is also doing other good social works, spreading supplies of safe public drinking water to poor rural villages in Fiji.

Tasteful Hydration

Maybe it’s that bottled water just tastes really good. These issues surrounding food packaging, transportation, and marketing were the focus of the first four weeks of this fall’s Introduction to Ethics class that I teach at Middlebury CCV. (We used the Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as our text for this first unit of the course.) Bottled water made it into the curriculum when discussing the various brands of H2O beverages that the students were bringing to class with them, where they came from geographically and geologically.

So I devised an admittedly not all that scientific blind taste test. I filled four carefully-washed Strafford Creamery glass milk jugs with water from my tap in Middlebury, a spring in Middlebury where many people go to fill their water jugs off the mountainside, FIJI water, and Poland Spring water. Thirteen student, staff, and passersby were given four small paper cups marked W,X,Y,Z, and filled with the four blind samples.

Four tasters preferred the Middlebury spring water: Cost, zero, transportation costs, whatever it takes you to get to the spring and fill your own containers; doesn’t contain additives, but no one is monitoring it, either.

Three tasters preferred the Middlebury tap water: cost, 367 gallons for $1, but does contain chlorine and flouride.

Three tasters preferred the FIJI water: cost, $3.65 per liter at the Co-op, plus the ample externalities of oil, trade, and landfilling costs.

Three tasters preferred the Poland Spring water: cost, $1.19 per liter, plus external costs of oil, trade, and landfilling.

The Message in the Bottle?

My class’s blind taste test showed that water taste preferences are pretty close to random; there was no distinct taste advantage to that expensive bottle of FIJI water once it was removed from its colorful packaging and put into an ordinary cup next to other water sources. I suspect that like most spring waters, it tastes awfully good coming out of the deep well in Fiji. But something is lost in bottling and transportation over thousands of miles in Chinese-made petroleum-based plastic bottles.

The ethics class I teach is, at heart, a class in critical thinking about right and wrong. What is the "right way to live" as the ancients would have put it, relative to drinking bottled water? My class learns to apply numerous different schools of ethical thought. We could consider our Kantian duties to the people of Fiji and of Maine and of Middlebury; we could list all the pros and cons of the various options; we could attempt to assign numerical values to the benefits and disadvantages of each option and do a utilitarian analysis of which bottled or unbottled water leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Trying to weigh the benefits of employment and the company’s social betterment programs verses transportation and petroleum costs versus supporting jobs in Poland Spring Maine or Saratoga Springs NY, or opting out of the entire system and filling up a carload of jugs at the spring up the road, is mind-boggling.

Here’s one thought from outside the box, or the bottle: Instead of the FIJI water company bottling artesian water there and selling it and using a portion of the profits to aid local safe drinking water development, why don’t the poor people of Fiji who don’t have safe drinking water drink the pure artesan water that would seem to be their birthright; then we drink our local water, we all don’t burn several billions of barrels of oil making bottles and transporting them empty and full, and we send a donation of a portion of the money we saved to help preserve the Fiji rainforest instead?

The older I get, the more I find that the philosophies of Thoreau rather than Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham take a stronger sway over my thinking: simplify, and live deliberately. I’ll opt out of the plastic and petroleum based alternatives and fill up empty bottles from my tap and the spring up the road, keeping a few cold in glass in the fridge. Which isn’t to say I won’t buy bottles of other stuff to drink from the Co-op: things from a distance that we don’t produce locally, like orange juice and pomegranate juice. And local beverages as well: milk, cider, and of course, beer. All that thinking makes me thirsty.

Welcome to Pantry Shelves: Satisfying Living

Getting out of the rat race is a matter of letting go. Pry your fingers off that cold steel bar, close your eyes, lean back, and fall. Instead of being dashed to bits on the jagged rocks below, you'll land in a warm feather bed, listening to a crackling woodstove fire while smelling soup simmering on the stove and bread just ready to come out of the oven. Think about prosperity instead of the race to accumulate wealth; healthfullnes instead of the anxiety of trying to secure health insurance; contentment with what you have instead of the drive to accumulate more--or to even keep up in today's sliding economy.

I don't have all the secrets; I'm still on the grid, I still own a car, and I can't realistically completely homestead on my half-acre small-Vermont-town residential lot. But I've got wood enough to get me through the winter, and my pantry shelves are groaning under the weight of all the food I've put up this summer--food that I scavenged and gathered, grew and harvested, supplemented with stuff bought from the local farmers market. I've still got kale and beets in the garden, and stir-fry greens growing in the cold frames. I've got sweaters and socks I've knit by hand, many of them of my own hand-spun yarn.

The downward economic turn will compel many people to turn to simple things out of necessity, and they'll be looking for the lost wisdom of how to can applesauce and cook on a woodstove. But in many quiet corners of the world and the U.S., even here in the fast-paced northeast, that wisdom never got lost. Winter comes every year, and even when the stock market isn't volatile and rumours of recession are not taking on that frightening edge, nothing beats the simple satisfaction of stocked-up pantry shelves.