{"id":8642,"date":"2010-09-13T11:59:01","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T16:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sustainablog.org\/?p=8642"},"modified":"2010-09-13T11:59:01","modified_gmt":"2010-09-13T16:59:01","slug":"bottled-water-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/bottled-water-business\/","title":{"rendered":"One Glug at a Time: The Rise and Fall of Bottled Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Last night, I dreamed that I was going on a long hike and needed a water bottle\u2014but there were none to be had. So of course I woke up thinking about the amazing transformation of consciousness around bottled water: a real triumph of grassroots Green marketing (and organizing) over a well-funded and powerful industry.<\/p>\n

When I was a kid in the ’60s, bottled water was a rarity. Most people I knew drank tap water. Unfiltered. A few health-fooders drank distilled water (which had no taste and I considered it undrinkable) or bottled spring water in gallon jugs\u2014maybe three to five brands taking up a very small section of the supermarket beverage aisle. Some offices did have “bubbler”-style water fountains, with two- or five-gallon jugs upended over an electric dispenser\/cooler. Oh yes, and plenty of people drank seltzer.<\/p>\n

But most of us still put a glass under the faucet and turned on the tap. End of story.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Rise (and Fall?) of the Bottled Water Business<\/h2>\n

In the 1970s and 80s, Perrier, and later Evian, became trendy. And Americans began to drink out of bottles. By 1977, 388.6 million gallons of water<\/a> were sold in bottles in the U.S. That number rose to 5,372.1 million by 2001, and took another huge leap to 8,253.6 million gallons in 2006.<\/p>\n

U.S. bottled water sales peaked in 2007, though. That year, Americans drank an average of 29 gallons of bottled water<\/a> \u2014astonishing growth considering the figure had only been 16 gallons as recently as 2000. If my math is right that’s 181 percent more bottled water consumption than just seven years earlier.<\/p>\n

But since that time, bottled water has become decidedly uncool. Environmental and corporate justice activists (and particularly Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle”<\/a> campaign, launched in 2004) have raised hard questions about such issues as<\/p>\n