Designer bottled water: It's not altruism

September 03, 2008 | 02:59 PM Upon entering several nationally franchised, upscale coffee houses, one is struck by an appealing advertisement behind a bin of bottled water stating, "As a matter of fact, the water you drink does make a difference." The label on the bottle explains that the company marketing the water is "helping the children get clean water" by donating a nickel for every bottle purchased. Here in New York, the customer pays $ 2.01 for 27.5 ounces of water: roughly $1.80 for water and plastic, $0.16 for tax, and $0.05 goes to a company foundation to help the children. While we cite New York as an example, this is a national campaign. The customer is made to feel good about contributing to a worthwhile endeavor, but at what price to the environment? New York City residents consume some 36 gallons of bottled water per person each year, creating about 52,500 tons of plastic waste, most of which is not recycled. The numbers are proportionally similar for Long Island. Of equal concern is that these plastic bottles conservatively consume 1.2 million barrels of oil in their manufacture and transport to the point of sale each year. The associated carbon footprint is on the order of 190,000 tons of carbon dioxide. At today's price of about $107 per barrel of oil, the cost amounts to some $128 million. The statistics are probably proportionally similar for bottled water use in other U.S. cities. Of course the real irony is that most U.S. communities have high quality water. Why use bottled water at all? This is a classic case of using the unfortunate to make a buck. It may sound appealing but it actually exploits the environment unnecessarily, consuming global oil reserves and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. For this designer water, one barrel of oil only makes about 1,800 plastic bottles. The cost of the product to the consumer is large as well and the amount of money going to the benefit of the children small as a proportion of the total price. This locally marketed bottled water would serve a much better need where potable water is not available — a country like Tanzania where the government has a goal to make safe drinking water accessible within 400 meters of every household by 2015. Tanzanians could use this water now. It would truly be lifesaving in the cyclone-torn Myanmar (Burma) and the earthquake-devastated Sichuan province in China. So why not effectively help the environment and serve humanity by resisting the purchase of this upscale water and using municipal water supplies? The $2.01 used to purchase the bottled water could be redistributed as follows: $0.03 for the same amount of good old Long Island tap water, $1 directly to the company foundation or other charity (and take an income tax write-off) that would supply the vital resource, and $0.98 to personal savings. Oh, and by the way, there is no sales tax! The water you choose to drink really does make a difference. R.L. Swanson is the director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute at Stony Brook University. Christine O'Connell is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at SBU. Your Turn is an occasional column by The Village Times Herald readers.