Water, the elixir of ... business?

FastCompany has a fascinating article about the bottled water industry. I drink the stuff, a lot, under what turns out to be misguided feeling that it is healthier than tap water.

However when I see little floaty bits bobbing about the eddies in a fresh glass of Singaporean 'New Water' (doublespeak for filtered grey-water) I feel somewhat justified. It's the rest of you who are mad!

In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. 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.

Facts like that do make you wonder...and then the article lays into the Fiji Water brand. Astonishing.

Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation--which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

I was a journalist. I am still an Australian. Both of which mean I am permanently cynical of most things.

I buy bottled water, but I never picture Scandanavian meadows or slowly melting snow caps...I always picture some old guy in a sweat stained singlet, filling the very bottle that is now in my hand from a fungus-encrusted tap at the back corner of a sooty factory building. The guy is always wearing shorts, always has a cold, and always, always has scabby legs.

I do not know what that means.

I do know that I'll leep labouring under the impression that bottled water is better for me than the stuff I get free out of the taps, and will therefore plonk down hard-earned for it...and let's face it -- it's safer than drinking out of the toilet bowl. Sometimes the lid falls on your head.

That's not a mistake you make twice.