According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation , bottled water system was an$18.5 billion manufacture in the U.S. in 2017 . Andbottled waterby volume grew by 7 percent from 2016 to 2017 from 12.8 billion gallons to 13.7 billion gallons , helpingbottled H2O surpass sodaas Americans ' preferent drink . Since then , bottled H2O hasoutsold soft drinksevery single class . The volume in 2021 for bottled water system was 15.7 billion gallons .
But just 100 years ago , bottled waterwas just even a business sector . Water was just something we get from our lights-out . So how did we get here ? How in the world did something we used to get for seemingly devoid turn into a billion - clam diligence ? Like so many innovative - day product successes , merchandising has flirt a huge use . But so have other factors .
Background on Bottled Water
First , a short history , because some of the same dynamics that influenced America ’s early bottled piddle industry explain why we ’re so athirst for bottled weewee today .
Bottled weewee once was a boom manufacture early in U.S. account : There are records of it being sold in the U.S. as early at 1767 . But business started flowing at the beginning of the 19th one C asdip - mould glass made bottles more affordableand easier to aggregate produce .
Back then , two types of customers drove bottled water sale : The productive and people who lived in cities . The flush take trips to spas and resort hotel built around innate springs , somineral waterbottled at the source was a way for them to continue enjoying those therapeutic benefits . Just for position : By 1856,Saratoga Springs was produce 7 million bottles of water system a year .
For the intermediate city - inhabitant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , bottled water was the good drinking option because municipal pee was often sicken . Drinking bottled water avail mass avoid disease like cholera , typhoid and dysentery .
But by 1920 , most U.S. cities put up free , separate out , chlorinated water , which dramatically improved public health . According to theNational Bureau of Economic Research , half of the decreases in deaths in major metropolis was due to clean pee . But what was a breakthrough for public wellness was also a reversal to the bottled body of water manufacture .
At the source of the twentieth century , with free and safe public water , the bottled piss industry adapt to grocery it could dish , primarily sell 5 - gal ( 18.9 - cubic decimeter ) bottles to large operations that necessitate water system for employees . Even with mass - produced glass , the bottle were heavy to ship , and that cost weighed down the bottled water line .
The Turning Point: 1970s and ’80s
The seventies and ' 80 were the real turn point for the " new " bottled water industriousness , thanks to three major influences . First , that ’s when American scientistNathaniel Wyeth patented PET plastic bottles . Unlike gravid glass , PET bottles could stomach the insistency of carbonate drinks . Because they were wanton than glass , PET bottleshelped prompt the bottled water system industriousness forward .
Second , these two decade are also when French sparkling weewee company Perrier launched its strong-growing merchandising campaign to get Americans to spend money on water . In the ' 70s , Perrierhired Orson Wellesto voiceover its TV ads toutingPerrieras " more quenching , more refreshing … " and " naturally sparkling , from the center of the Earth . "
But the final energy to bottled water came in 1986 when theEnvironmental Protection Agency(EPA ) released a reputation showing tap water supply used by 36 million Americans containedhigh levels of lead . Even though cities rushed to fix problem after Congressional probe , the suspicion of municipal piddle lingered , making the switch from public water to bottled water a lasting one for many .
The Fear Factor
So , the health halo that has graced bottled water since ancient times largely explains our disbursement habits — even when what we ’re purchase is simply filtered rap water , such as PepsiCo’sAquafinaand Coca - Cola ’s Dasani . ( Taste , as it turns out , is n’t a component . )
These advert campaigns around health , pureness and youth study so well because they invoke to our desire for immortality . investigator at the University of Waterloo conducteda studyin 2018 that tested this " affright management theory " — the idea that thinking and behavior is driven by our fear of death — to explain why we ’re uncoerced to spend money on water when we could just turn on the tap and get it much cheap . Their results establish that a fear of death does play a office in why people grease one’s palms bottled body of water , even though they know it may not be better for them or good for the satellite .
The other psychological — and real — face that drive hoi polloi to spend money on bottled water supply is the continued lack of trust in government to cater clean , secure drinking water and keep water organization . count that people of Flint , Michigan have relied on bottled water through the contamination crisis that ’s lasted years there , as have First Nations hoi polloi in Canada , wherewater to reserves has been under drinking advisoriessince January 2016 .
attempt by the Trump administration torepeal the Union Clean Water Rule , and the protest raised by advocator and residential district only further erode reliance . Failure to furnish clean-living body of water to communities of poor people and the great unwashed of color , and the result mistrust createa lasting habitof buy bottled piss .
" The use of bottled water in emergency brake situations is a perfectly expert idea , but the challenge is rebuild public trust after such emergency so that secret bottled water supply economic consumption can then be eliminated , " Dr. Peter H. Gleick , president - emeritus and chief scientist at thePacific Institutefor Studies in Development , Environment and Security , said in an email interview . " Bottled water should never be a permanent answer to provide dependable , low-cost , true imbibing water supply for mass . " Gleick is also the author of " Bottled and trade : The Story Behind Our Obsession with Water . "
And , considering the environmental costs of bottled water , a mass switch would help the planet . crusade that give peoplereusable bottles , laws that shun exclusive exercise nursing bottle and the new incarnation of drinking outflow as feeding bottle refilling stations , show hope — but themessages to change our habitsneed to match the major power of those that drive sales of bottled piss .
" The other challenge , of trend , is that individual bottled body of water companies have large budgets for advertising their ' product , ' while municipal water agencies do not , " Gleick said . " This instability has bring out a place where it is easy to fall back trust in a municipal water system and toilsome to retrieve it , even when the vast majority of our water system are good , and far , far brassy than bottled H2O . And in shoes around the populace where dependable water tap body of water is n’t available , the answer is to make it available , not to give up and rely on costly , secret bottled water . "
