The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has told Vivid Water Ltd – which stated ‘1 million boxes on 1 truck compared to 58 trucks needed to transport 1 million plastic bottles’ on its website for its Vivid Water In A Box brand – it can no longer make the claim as it failed to substantiate it when asked.
The ASA also found that the company could not substantiate the implication there was a health risk from PET bottles – a claim that it said was inferred by the statement ‘no PET no health threat from leaching’.
“We understood that the claim was based on information Vivid Water received from an email from the carton industry trade body.
​ "In the absence of such evidence, we concluded that the claim had not been substantiated, and was therefore misleading.”​ PET health threat?​ Text on waterinabox.co.uk’s website stated “our box does not contain PET so there is no health threat from leaching”.
Vivid Water said its ad did not claim that PET leached into bottled water, but rather that PET leaching would not occur with their carton packaged water because it was made from polymer that was not PET-based.
The company provided an email it had received from the carton manufacturer, which stated that their cartons were not made from PET, but from polyethylene.
The ASA said that consumers would interpret the phrase to mean that plastic packaging for bottled water presented health risks compared to carton based packaging.
Neither did an email from the carton manufacturer reference or contain evidence that PET packaging carried health risks.
The ASA said: “Because we had not seen evidence that PET bottled water presented health risks, we concluded that the claim “No PET no health threat from leaching” had not been substantiated and was misleading”.​ Vivid has now removed the reference to PET from its website, stating instead that, with regards to its boxes, ‘There is no health threat from leaching’.
Editor’s comment With consumers increasingly concerned about plastic waste, alternative water packaging formats have been clamouring to present themselves as more sustainable formats.