bottled waterThe Story of Bottled Water, released in conjunction with World Water Day (22 March 2010) is the latest animated video from Annie Leonard – creator of the internet sensation The Story of Stuff. This latest video takes a close look at the bottled water industry and exposes some of the outrageous statistics and methodologies employed by the industry – and some of these are truly startling.



World Water Day is an annual UN-sponsored day of action to support access to clean, safe water for all. However, globally more than 1 billion people have no choice but to drink water from harmful sources. Strangely, these are not the people with access to water in bottles. Rather it is the “rich” western countries that have vigorously adopted bottled water even though they generally have ample access to safe and abundant water from the tap, and despite the enormous waste of money, energy and resources it represents.

Leo Lewis of The Australian – Business section recently reported “that the rise in Asia’s middle classes is poised to create an explosion in the global market for bottled water that will see the world consuming more than 280 billion litres annually by 2012”. It seems that bottled water is seen as a symbol of middle class luxury and that demand is set to increase by anywhere up to 25% over the next three years as the middle classes grow in emerging countries like China and India.

Although Annie’s latest video is quite US-centric it is still well worth viewing and may just start a groundswell that might head off some the horrifying environmental prospects, based on the projected uptake in Asia, that we could face if we continue to believe the bottled water industry hype.

Mixing oil and water – from The Australasian Bottled Water Institute Inc.

  • Australians spent $385 million on 250 million litres of bottled water in 2006.
  • It takes 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a typical one-litre plastic bottle — or 850 million megajoules to bottle 250 million litres of water.
  • A barrel of oil has 6000 megajoules, so it takes 141,666 barrels of oil to make the PET plastic.
  • The energy required to bring bottled water to market — converting the PET plastic into bottles, bottling the water, transporting and refrigerating the bottled water — means the amount of oil required equals 20 per cent of the bottle's volume.
  • For 250 million litres of water, which equals 50 million litres of oil — 314,465 barrels of oil.
  • In addition to the water in bottles, twice as much water is also used in the production process. So that every litre sold represents three litres of water.
  • Drinking water out of a tap uses only 0.2 megajoules according to EPA Victoria.

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Written by Suze Chalmers