Bottled water is a bit of a scam... Do you think it's safer and healthier?

So, bottled water is kind of scam. People think it is healthier and safer despite no evidence showing that... So is it all one big marketing scam?! Well... kinda.

I’m going to take you through the history of bottled water to show exactly how we ended up where we are, and why it is so, so, so bad that we are where we are.

Find us online:
‍‍www.briannewest.com
‍‍https://www.instagram.com/briannemwest/
‍‍https://www.tiktok.com/@briannemwest
‍‍https://www.youtube.com/@briannemwest‍

‍Wanna know more about Incrediballs?
‍‍www.incrediballs.com‍
‍https://www.instagram.com/incrediballsdrinks/
‍‍https://www.tiktok.com/@incrediballsdrinks
‍
‍‍Business, but Better (the FREE education hub for founders & entrepreneurs):‍
‍www.businessbutbetter.com‍
‍https://www.tiktok.com/@businessbutbetter‍
https://www.facebook.com/groups/businessbutbetter
‍https://www.instagram.com/businessbutbetter

Transcript:

Brianne (intro): Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place, without the judgment and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place.

Brianne: Can you imagine a better business model than getting something for next to nothing and selling it for thousands all whilst lapping up praise and adulation for your generosity? Well, welcome back and brace yourself because today I'm having a rant about bottled water.

So 40 or 50 years ago, bottled water was just not the thing it is today, right? It has been around for centuries. In fact, the very first bottled water plant, using the term loosely, was the Holy Well Bottling Plant in the UK, created in 1622. 1622! And you were encouraged to drink it, bathe in it, and it would cure you of everything from syphilis, otherwise known somewhat unkindly as the French disease, to consumption, that's tuberculosis, or to rot of the brain, and God knows what that referred to. Bottled water first became commercially available in 1767 from Boston in the USA. So yes, technically kind of an American invention. Jackson's spa bottled their mineral water to try and share the benefits with all of the poor people who couldn't get there. It It was a kind thing to do.

They sold millions. So, you know, their kindness paid off for them. Then in 1783, Johann Jacob Schweppes, and if you don't get that reference, you don't spend enough time on TikTok, or Schweppes, as it's actually pronounced, he discovered a way to carbonate water. So boom, instant soda water. No prizes as to what company he went on to found. Back then, some, or maybe most of this water was genuinely safer than the stuff that came out of the plumbing outside, right? Because typhoid and cholera were basically a sure thing if you drank from most of these public pumps.

You can't blame those that could afford it for drinking the bottled stuff. And of course, they may well have been contaminated too because, you know, there was no testing, but it seemed safer. Now chlorination began to be used in around 1910. Now chlorination began to be used in around 1908, 1910 and bottled water started to lose favour because people realised that the stuff that came for free out of the pumps outside and eventually their taps was safer and again, free. So bottled water kind of dwindled away to nothing, bobbing along, the odd mineral sale, nothing exciting. But then, 40 years later, drum roll please, something arrived that changed the game. And yes, if you're guessing plastic bottles, you would be correct.

Now they were considered a much better alternative to glass because they didn't break and they were easier to reuse. Yes, because they were considered more sustainable, although the word wasn't used back then as we use it now. But nothing really happened until polyethylene tetra phthalate bottles arrived, or you'll know it as PET or PET. Now they were invented by engineer Nathaniel Wyeth from DuPont. Note, he just made the bottle.

PET has been around for a bit longer. And I think it's an interesting segue into DuPont here because I think they're an intriguing company because they began life as a gun powder company. And they also count some other inventions, things like CFCs, which were refrigerant gases and of course destroyed the ozone layer, Teflon, which is problematic if you go and have a look at some of the class actions, Neoprene and Kevlar.

Now their mission statement is, we're using science and innovation to make the world a safer, healthier, and better place. Now do with that what you will. So now PET changed the game because it made plastic bottles cheap, cheap, and easy to work with. So we're in the 1970s, everybody is drinking tap water, bottled water sales are at an all-time low, and then comes Perrier. You've probably seen Perrier. It looks almost exactly the same then as it does now.

It's that beautiful green glass bottle. So Perrier is a French sparkling water brand that had been doing pretty average sales since the 1800s and obviously all of a sudden they got ambitious and they wanted to enter the US market which was even back then the world's largest consumer market. They hired a clever man, a marketing executive called Bruce Nevins and in one of the world's most spectacular marketing strategies you've never heard of, they used Orson Welles to make water into the next elite product.

Orson Welles, if you don't know who he was, and I didn't, is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of all time and I will admit this was one of the only times that celebrity endorsements have actually worked and worked well because look at where we are now.

So in the 1970s and 80s, people were beginning to focus on health and drinking was losing a lot of its sheen and by drinking I mean alcohol, of course. So by positioning this fancy sparkly water as not only being better for you but making you look better than your friends, which is a big reason why we buy a lot of things, they went from 3 million bottles sold in 1975 to 200 million in 1980. That is bonkers.

Talk about an epic success story. That's what Incrediballs is going to do. That's my plan. Except, you know, no bottles. Anyway, from there, there is a lot of history. There's a lot of back and forth. And actually, it's weirdly interesting. But I want to skip to the next part because there's a lot to this episode. Now, guess who bought Purier in 1992? Yeah, Nestlé, one of my favourite companies. So Neslé’s Pure Life, no shit, that's actually what they call their bottled water PR campaign, is essentially the mastermind behind the world's growing obsession with bottled water. Just a side note, in April they had to destroy 2 million bottles of their water because it contained bacteria of faecal origin. So, you know, super pure. Anyway, this epic marketing and credit where credit is due, they have masterminded an amazing PR campaign against tap water, has spread around the world.

And yes, they've obviously been helped by other massive brands like Danone, which is a B Corp if you're wondering. And now we're where we are. So where are we? Well, last year, 600 billion bottles of water were sold. 600 billion.

It's expected to be worth $700 billion in New Zealand in 2030. Now, the biggest buyer is China, where about 40 billion litres are sold, despite 92% of the population having access to safe, healthy tap water. Give or take another 40 billion litres sold in the USA, note the population difference, where about 99% of the population has access to safe tap water. Now before you start jumping up and down a shrieking flint at me, I'm going to get to it. Now in fact, of the top seven countries that consume bottled water, only one, Mexico, has more than 10% of the urban population with unsafe tap water at 12%. So the vast, vast, vast majority of people have access to clean drinking water. Now obviously, if you have unsafe tap water bottled or treated in some way, is the way forward. I am not talking to those people who have no choice, like the people in Flint, probably one of the more infamous cases where their tap water was contaminated with lead due to cost cutting exercises.

The question really is why are we buying so much bottled water en masse when it's literally on tap in our homes? And when so much money is spent on ensuring that that tap water is safe and clean? Now I know I'm going to get a few comments coming through here talking about things like fluoride and chlorine, and I will get to those, but one of the biggest arguments is that people buy bottled water because it's convenient.

People are just buying a one-off bottle of water at the fuel station. Well stats would argue with you because 60% of bottled water sales are at supermarkets and typically in bulk packs. About 30% occurs in convenient stores like dairies and the remaining 10% is places like restaurants and hotels and, kind of weirdly, online. Who is buying water online?

Message me, I want to know why. So that kind of gives you an indication that the reason people are buying bottled water is not convenience, it's health. They have drank the Kool-Aid, if you'll pardon the clumsy pun, and they have bought into the myth that bottled water is healthier, or at least safer now, technically not the same thing. It isn't. Statistically speaking, of course, there are always exceptions, as I've mentioned. And why do I have to keep putting that little disclaimer in there because I can already imagine the comments.

Standards for bottled water are the same as tap water, but the testing requirements to ensure those standards are upheld are not. So the requirements are the same for a lot of contaminants like lead or nitrates, at least in Aotearoa New Zealand, in the USA and Australia where I've checked, but the difference is in that monitoring because tap water is tested much, much, much more than bottled water. Tap water has to be tested at least daily,

usually more frequently. While bottled water, which yes, sometimes comes from the same places as tap water, it doesn't come from the magic water fairy, those factories have more wiggle room and they may only do it once a week.

They also don't have to publicly report the results as frequently or at all. Now you might think once a week sounds like enough, right? Because the water source isn't changing. Just remember, some of these factories are pumping out millions of bottles a day.

So for something to go wrong within that week, for a contaminant to appear, that is potentially tens of millions of bottles that have an issue. Now there's been a few studies done showing incidents of bottled water being less safe than tap due to this lack of testing. So the EWG or the Environmental Working Group did one, but honestly I wouldn't believe them if they told me the sky was blue.

So I'm not going to quote that one, although just FYI, bottled water was worse off. More importantly, the NRDC, the National Resources Defence Council from the States, they conducted a four-year study on bottled water and they analysed more than a thousand bottles of 103 brands of bottled water. One third of the tested bottled water brands violated their own industry standards or exceeded state or federal limits for things like arsenic or synthetic organic chemicals.

That doesn't happen in the tap water world because it is caught first. And another one done, this one's my favourite, because it's most amusingly done by the city of Cleveland, who got a little bit pissed off when Fiji Water did a marketing campaign implying how much better off their water was. Kind of a bit awkward because when tested, Fiji Water contained arsenic, a pretty unpleasant heavy metal, whereas the city water contains none.

Now, side note, Fiji water as a brand pisses me off so much. Imagine taking water from a developing nation, profiting off it in the tens of millions and giving sod all of that back to the place you got it. In fact, it's kind of leaving the place worse off because where does a lot of that plastic end up? And no, it's not Fijian owned.

Now, none of this is necessarily saying that bottled water is bad for you because that's not my point. My point is that it's not better for you and that is what people will think. I travel a lot. I always drink the tap water. I check in some places but I always drink the tap water. Someone I travel with on occasion does not believe that tap water is safe, even in countries like Australia.

That's not to say that that person is stupid. It is to say that PR marketing is so insidious and so embedded in there that you don't even know it is and I'm just trying to combat some of that. Because let's talk about microplastics. Now a very interesting and slightly terrifying thing to consider is one of the reasons there aren't that many studies on what microplastics are doing to us is because scientists can't find a control group. A control group is a group of people unaffected by the thing that they are testing. So that is a group of people who don't contain microplastics. The bloody things are everywhere in your hearts and your testicles, and I'm not being crude, that study was released a few weeks ago, and because testicles are for some reason considered more important than hearts, it was everywhere. So yeah, they're in the water. But they're in 93% of bottled water versus 83% of tap water samples. And yes, those are stats from studies, and they all vary a little bit, but that's roughly the ratio. But this isn't surprising as they are literally packaged in plastic, so of course bottled water is more likely to contain microplastics, but the worst bit is the amount. Bottled water contained on average 325 microplastic particles per litre, whilst tap was only 5.4. Now, we don't know what microplastics are doing to us, but I don't think any of us think that it's good. Because unfortunately, amongst all of the wonderful properties plastics have, they have this cute little chemical property where they absorb other chemicals onto their surface. So they're often contaminated with worse things, like dioxins for example.

So they're quite possibly a transport system if you like, for these chemicals that ordinarily find it difficult to get in, because our bodies are pretty good at keeping things out. Except not microplastics. We cannot keep them out. And of course, the more bottled water we buy, the more microplastics we create, so it's a vicious little cycle. So hopefully, you might be considering that maybe bottled water isn't safer than tap.

But it's definitely healthier, right? Because they all say pure in some form or other, and they've got pictures of waterfalls or tropical islands or a happy woman on the front, girl smiles at salad. Sure, some mineral waters, and the key here is some, have higher levels of things like magnesium, which if you're deficient in it, can be helpful. But by and large, these health benefits are massively overstated and actually the vast, vast majority of bottled water isn't from mineral springs anyway. Some is, for sure, but most isn't. But due to some very clever lobbying by Big Water, which is 100% a phrase I'm using from now on, the definition of spring water is really weak. So the stuff in your bottle is probably from the same place as your tap and you're just paying a lot more for it. In some cases, 24,000 times more for it. Now a lot of this hype around mineral and spring water comes from way back when and like so many things in the 1900s, there's pretty dubious evidence or none.

Which brings me to my very favourite bottled water example, Radithor. What was Radithor you ask? Well, it was radium infused drinking water of course. If you want to read more about Radith, because I'm not going to talk about it much, there is an article still available online with my favourite ever headline. The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off. Honestly, go and read about it. Radium is a wonderfully radioactive element that the body recognises to be similar in many ways to calcium, so it incorporates it in your teeth and bones. Unfortunately, because it is radioactive, it continually emits radioactive particles and waves until those parts of you fall apart. Maybe this episode should become a content warning. If you haven't read a book called the Radium Girls, I really encourage you to because their horrific story is a huge reason why we actually have occupational health and safety laws. And if you really want to feel ill, Google radium jaw.

Now I could talk ad nauseum about radiation because I actually find it so fascinating, but why am I bringing this horrendous example up? Because yeah, the bottled water we're drinking isn't going to make your teeth fall out, but people seem to have this peculiar belief that if it's in a bottle, and particularly if it says mineral or spring on it, then it's healthier. We have a belief that these businesses aren't lying to us, which is odd because cynicism against corporates is at an all-time high, and yet what we say about these companies and what we do in the supermarkets are two totally different things. And despite significantly, thankfully, stricter standards than Raditha's days, these businesses are still misleading you. The stuff in the bottles is no better for you than the stuff in the tap. 99.9999999 times out of 100. Okay, fine. Let's talk about fluoride and chlorine. Both are commonly added to tap water for safety and health benefits.

Yes, because they are safe. Both are proven over and over and over to be safe at the concentrations of which we add them. Without question, both can be nasty chemicals, but we all know now that the dose makes the poison. Water is enormously dangerous and will kill you itself if you drink too much. But no one really gets excited about that. So chlorine is used in tiny, tiny concentrations in Aotearoa, around 0.2 parts per million. The WHO, the World Health Organisation, considers up to 5 parts per million, or 25 times higher, to be safe.

It disinfects water, so it makes sure that the water doesn't make you sick. Because yes, a lot of our aquifers are now contaminated with amoebas or things like E. coli. Yes, sometimes if it's high, but still well under 0.5 parts per million, you can taste or smell it. But there is an easy solution. You can either get a filter, like a Brita filter, for example, or even easier, just let the water sit for a while and most of that chlorine evaporates. So throw a jug of water in the fridge, and by the time you go back to it in a couple of hours, the chlorine taste will mostly be gone.

Fluoride does not evaporate. So if it's in your tap water, you will be consuming it. Now, it is added to prevent tooth decay, and it has been endorsed by numerous health organisations. Every scientist who's ever studied it, who wasn't a liar or a charlatan, including the WHO and the CDC, Centre for Disease Control, for its role in improving dental health. If you want to be really shocked, go and have a look at the stands of dental health in Aotearoa.

They're not great. And this is precisely why it is added. Now, there are concerns about fluoride being a neurotoxin, and they stem from really high dose studies, where yes, again, it's not a nice chemical at high concentrations because dose makes the poison.

But the levels used in water for relation are considered perfectly safe and beneficial by health authorities. So in New Zealand, this is between 0.7 to one part per million. The safe level set by the WHO is 1.5 parts per million. Although in the USA, the EPA actually set it at four parts per million, so that's much higher. So we are well, well, well below the safe threshold for fluoride. There is often more fluoride in things like grapes and raisins and wine, fruits and vegetables, tea, coffee. It's pretty common. You're probably consuming more of it than you think. And it is, of course, worth noting that bottled water may or may not contain fluoride, depending on the brand and the source. Then I think there's something that's actually more important for a lot of us, which is nitrates, because this is becoming a greater concern, especially as the link between nitrates and bowel cancer is becoming stronger and stronger. Now, nitrates end up in our water due to runoff from farming practices, and some of our fresh water is pretty contaminated with them. Now, as I mentioned, tap water is monitored strictly, and those of you on town supply are good to go. Those of us in rural areas may want to pay that little bit more attention.

Not only we're more likely to be contaminated with nitrates, but those of us on wells, we don't have that monitoring. So you may want to go and get your water tested. Some places will do it for free.

And if it's high, your best bet is to get some kind of filtration in. But fun fact, again, bottled water might contain nitrates too, because again, lots of it comes from the same place and they have the exact same standards on nitrates as tap water. Those that actually come from spring water, which are deep upwellings of fresh water, so for some reason they're healthier, despite no basis in science, they potentially will have lower levels as they're hopefully not contaminated yet, but you know, give it time.

Oh, and alkaline water, absolute rubbish, non-seats carbolic, I won't even bother talking about it, so please, please stop wasting money on something that cannot possibly work, because you cannot change the pH of your body, and I promise you, if you did, you would die horribly. Now disappointingly, not everyone Aotearoa has access to safe tap water. Boil water notices are active in a few places for several reasons and have been active for a long time. Now I'm

not talking to those people. I feel sorry for you. I think it's a disgrace. But it is worth noting that the long-term solution to unsafe tap water is not buying bottled water. How is that fair or sustainable, governments need to pull finger. Now, despite all this evidence, most people when surveyed think bottled water is safer. That is how pervasive the marketing is. You can't blame people in Flint for buying bottled water even when over 97% of the plumbing has since been replaced and massively rigorous testing has been implemented because they've lost faith.

But why are we buying it here in Aotearoa? Have you ever wondered where the bottled water you buy actually comes from? Because the sources of many of these brands are pretty grey and whilst they may say spring, as I pointed out before, this definition is a bit grey. There are plenty of documented cases where what was said to be spring water is in fact bog standard water out of an aquifer. You just pay a lot more for it.

There are huge court cases against a lot of brands around the world about this, Nestlé being one of the worst, which is of course an enormous surprise to all of us. And companies pay as little as $200 in licensing fees to pump out millions of litres of water. And that's not a US stat, that is a New Zealand stat. It's hard to find sources for this, it's funny enough they don't want it out there, but licensing fees are out there for you to go and read about if you want to. But one company that the data is very publicly available for is Orovida. Orovida pays about $500 annually to draw up to 400,000 litres of water per day from the Otakiri Aquifer in the Bay of Plenty. And if you can't do that maths in your head, because I can't, that's about 146 million litres per year, costing them about $526 in compliance fees. Now whilst you're digesting that, I'm going to read you some of their marketing as I think it's hilarious.

The water originates in Antarctica where gale force winds convert the ice crystals into water vapour which is carried by the jet stream winds to New Zealand or Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. Isn't that romantic? I never thought that I could fall in love with water crystals before but here we are. Still, it is better than anything Chet GPT could have written I suppose.

But putting that aside, it should really annoy people that companies are bottling a natural resource for sod all and selling it for enormous profits, destroying ecosystems by removing massive quantities of water and polluting the environment with plastic. And we're paying them for it! Have you ever sat down and thought how entirely bonkers that is? And finally, because this was supposed to be a short episode, but it is Plastic Free July so let's talk about those bottles. Most water bottles, as I mentioned before, are made of PET, which is technically recyclable, but often just isn't due to the sheer volume of them. So that's about 31% recycled in New Zealand and 36% in Australia.

And most bottles aren't made of recycled plastic because it's cheaper to buy virgin plastic than recycled. So why would a company do it? And I do actually remember asking one of our former prime ministers, who was still in office at the time, why we didn't implement a tax on virgin plastics to try and encourage more recycling. And the answer was really disappointing. Basically, it's too complicated and it wouldn't work. Really? I feel like it would. Granted, I'm not a tax expert, so I will leave that to the experts. And if we talk about water waste, for every one litre of bottled water, it takes three litres of water to make it, because it takes about 1.5 litres of water to make the plastic bottle and then the rest for processing.

So the volume of water used in bottle products is actually three times higher than you thought. So if we look at some fast facts on these plastic bottles, in Aotearoa we use 11,000 tonnes of plastic bottles each year. That's a growing number and 69% of these end up in landfill or worse, the ocean. In Australia they use 373 million plastic bottles every year just for bottled water and over 60% of those will not be recycled.

And brace yourself, because I thought I'd throw the USA in here for, you know, a real quantification of how horrendous this problem is. Americans use 50 billion plastic water bottles every year. 35 billion of them are not recycled. And finally, water shortages are becoming worse and worse, and they will continue to, as climate change continues to bite, and we continue to treat our fresh water with blatant disregard.

Now, bottled water certainly isn't the biggest driver of this, but it is a significant contributor. Putting everything else I've talked about aside, there isn't actually too much info about this, but about 83 million litres of water are trapped in the landfill every year by people throwing away bottles that aren't empty. Of course, trapped in a plastic bottle that doesn't break down, note I said break down, of course water that's trapped in a plastic bottle that doesn't break up into microplastics for 4, 5, 600 years can't evaporate. So it's trapped there for a very long time and effectively removed from the water cycle. Freshwater is a finite resource.

So yeah, let's stop falling for the hype. Embrace the tap, ban the bottle, go plastic free, however you want to phrase it. Let's stop lining the pockets of companies who are manipulating us into buying stuff that they effectively get for free. This is a really funny episode to write actually, kind of enraging, but a lot of fun and I hope it's been interesting.

If you want to know more, there is a fabulous series on Netflix called Rotten and they have a particular episode on bottled water, but they do cover some others like avocados for example which are way more bloody and war-torn than you might imagine. But yeah, if you're going somewhere, take your reusable water bottle. Kia ora kaitiaki. Have a wonderful week. I will see you next week for another episode of this or that.

Brianne (outro): And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous, but sustainability at its heart is just using what you need. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. Kia Ora and I'll see you next week.

‍