DENVER – Sales are skyrocketing for the bottled water industry, but what are companies actually selling to customers?
In its new report “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 percent of bottled water comes from municipal taps and that it cost almost 2,000 times as much as tap water and four times as much as gasoline.
“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,” says Lovera.
“That’s not the case in most American cities.
That’s enough to fill the Empire State Building 1.3 times.
Lovera says even though most tap water systems are safe, the country’s water infrastructure is in need of maintenance, especially in places such as Flint, Michigan, and that federal funding is the best avenue for that.
But she adds that it can be difficult to get support for this idea.
“It’s hard to build that political will if people think that you buy water at the grocery store and you just have to go take care of it that way,” she says.
“We kind of undermine this sense of ownership and accountability for having a tap water system that works for everybody.” The bottled water industry has spent millions lobbying the U.S. Congress and federal regulators.