Bottled water sales in the United States are skyrocketing, but a new report looks at what is actually being sold to those customers. In “Take Back the Tap,” Food and Water Watch researchers look at the booming business of bottled water, which surpassed soda in sales in 2016. The group finds nearly 64% of bottled water comes from municipal taps, and that it cost almost two thousand times as much as tap water and four times as much as gasoline. Patty Lovera with Food and Water Watch tells us bottled water companies target demographics through advertising, especially immigrant communities.
“It is much more the norm in other countries where you have to go buy bottled water because the safety systems aren’t there for tap water. That’s not the case in most American cities. That’s pretty predatory to convince people they need to keep spending their hard-earned money to do that, and undermining people’s confidence in tap water.”
Bottled water companies contend their water is safer. The report also found about 70% of bottles aren’t recycled and that four billion pounds of plastic were used to produce bottles in 2016.
