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Plastic Water Bottles, Which Enabled a Drinks Boom, Now Threaten a Crisis (wsj.com)
Bottled water, which recently dethroned soda as America's most popular beverage, is facing a crisis. From a report: A consumer backlash against disposable plastic plus new government mandates and bans in places such as zoos and department stores have the world's biggest bottled-water makers scrambling to find alternatives. Evian this year pledged to make all its plastic bottles entirely from recycled plastic by 2025, up from 30% today and among the boldest goals in the industry. Executives at parent company Danone hope the move will help it regain market share and win over plastic detractors who are already pressuring the makers of straws, bags and coffee cups.
There's a big problem. The industry has tried and failed for years to make a better bottle. Existing recycling technology needs clean, clear plastic to make new water bottles, and bottled-water companies say low recycling rates and a lack of infrastructure have stymied supply. Danone, for its part, is betting the reputation of its flagship water brand on a new technology that claims to turn old plastic from things like dirty carpets and sticky ketchup bottles into plastic suitable for new water bottles. [...] Bottled-water sales have boomed in recent decades amid safety fears about tap water and a shift away from sugary drinks. Between 1994 and 2017, U.S. consumption soared 284% to nearly 42 gallons a year per person, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a consulting firm. Further reading: Microplastics Found In 93 Percent of Bottled Water Tested In Global Study, and Amazon Wants To Curb Selling 'CRaP' Items it Can't Profit On, Like Bottled Water and Snacks: Report.
There's a big problem. The industry has tried and failed for years to make a better bottle. Existing recycling technology needs clean, clear plastic to make new water bottles, and bottled-water companies say low recycling rates and a lack of infrastructure have stymied supply. Danone, for its part, is betting the reputation of its flagship water brand on a new technology that claims to turn old plastic from things like dirty carpets and sticky ketchup bottles into plastic suitable for new water bottles. [...] Bottled-water sales have boomed in recent decades amid safety fears about tap water and a shift away from sugary drinks. Between 1994 and 2017, U.S. consumption soared 284% to nearly 42 gallons a year per person, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a consulting firm. Further reading: Microplastics Found In 93 Percent of Bottled Water Tested In Global Study, and Amazon Wants To Curb Selling 'CRaP' Items it Can't Profit On, Like Bottled Water and Snacks: Report.
Use a deposit. Every can costs you 50 cents more which you'll get back upon return.
Works like a charm in other countries.
We Swiss are even dumb enough to recycle without deposits, silly us.
And if worse comes to worst, use aluminum cans! Beverages taste better from those anyhow...
exists
We used to use glass bottles for milk, soda, and other beverages. They were returned, cleaned, and refilled instead of recycled. Refilling uses less energy then destroying and recreating.
Its piped into my house and costs pennies a gallon. Good luck finding a public water fountain these days.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"and bottled-water companies say low recycling rates and a lack of infrastructure have stymied supply"
Ironic since communities all over are having to fight back against the cuts being made to their recycling programs. Maybe the problem isn't the recycling programs but that so many places chose the cheapest route (China etc) for their recycling materials to go to ....
Aluminum cans are easy to make from recycled cans, tend to get recycled more, and are more compact per volume of liquid than plastic bottles.
Hell, I'm seeing soda makers moving from cans to bottles more; this seems counterproductive. Just keep using aluminum cans!
I'm more concerned that we've now been conditioned to having to buy water in bottles when it's one of the most abundant substances on Earth. It represents a failure of the imagination and the triumph pf profits-over-people. Corporations pollute available water and then say, "Oh, you can still have clean water, you'll just have to pay us for it by the bottle now, and on top of that, we'll sell it to you in bottles made of petroleum-based substances so you can have even more pollution and need to pay us for even more stuff. #Winning."
You are welcome on my lawn.
I always carry an insulated permanent water bottle. usually filled with ice before I leave my home.
If you are willing to pay $1.00 (minimum - by far) to get a bottle of water, you either foolishly failed to think ahead, a fool that throws money away, or someone making more than $250k ( at $1 every 30 seconds to fill your bottle, is about $250,000 a year.)
The thing to use is a vacuum-insulated steel bottle. Lasts years, and will keep cold cold and hot hot.
No one needs to know what's in my bottle. Could be tap, could be s. pellegrino, could be brandy, could be single-malt.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It tastes better, is inert so doesn't leach anything into the product as you can see with most plastic bottled drinks having what looks like an oil slick floating on top if you pour them into a glass, infinitely reusable and recyclable, just wash and refill or if damaged remelt and reform.
I remember the old days of thick glass bottles that you could slam against a brick wall 3-4 times before they would finally break.
Refill your personal bottle from a much larger container (or with tap water, carbonated on demand). Re-use is better than recycling anyhow. There should probably be improvements on cleaning bottles, perhaps a standardized bottle interface and form factors, so that personal bottles could be cleaned automatically.
Evian spelled backward is "naive", but you already knew that, right? BTW: Who's drinking my share of the 42 gal/year? My water gets tested twice a day. I call it "tap water".
They are also sold in plastic bottles. I am not much of a soda(pop/soda/soda pop) drinker. But I try to always keep milk at the house, which I then put in a thermos to bring to work.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Plastic is a terrible substance because it can't be re-used, and it sucks to recycle.
We used to use glass bottles, and we solved the recycling problem by requiring a deposit. Even at 10 cents a bottle, you'd get armies of people returning them for profit. Or if you want, use aluminum.
But stop trying to make plastic into some great material, because it's never going to be. It's cheap, and nobody wants to use the alternatives because they're more expensive. This is a simple economic problem with a negative externality (the plastic). Economic problems are often solved by economic solutions. Just make the plastic solution expensive. You'll see the bottled water industry figure out a better solution quickly.
The solution to recycling plastic is DON'T
The solution to plastic in landfils and our oceans is don't put it there.
The right answer is to collect it! Use a deposit to get people to actually return it. Once returned burn it in a waste to energy facility, with proper high temperature combustion and flue-gas remediation its not going to be a whole lot worse than oil plants and probably still cleaner than a coal plant.
It gets rid of the waste and produces useful electricity. Now I am not saying do this to the exclusion of other activities to address the waste plastics challenge; certainly we can look to using other more renewable, better biodegradable materials for things like packaging, food and beverage transport etc. We are not going to replace plastics though because there are a lot of applications where they are really really ideally suited.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
They can start by not making the damn 8oz mini bottles from the last party we went to. 2 sips of water per bottle. I felt guilty just looking at them! Like a pound of plastic, a cardboard box, and more plastic for the box cover all for 1.5 gallons of water.
All the talk of microplastics and I still haven't seen the plastic slats for cyclone fencing mentioned. Ours completely disintegrated and disappeared over the years, right into the storm drain and dry well that feeds the aquifer. That was enough plastic for 1000 water bottles. No idea if what they sell now is any better, but they still sell the same plastic slats.
in Asia.
Problem solved.
It is going to die out in the civilized world at least.
It is loosing the image of "healthy water" as opposed to tap water. It turns out it is not as free of pollutants as they would like you to believe. In most civilized places tap water is just as good.
At the same time it is gaining the image of the most inefficient, environmentally unfriendly way, of distributing drinking water.
Image is everything in this business, after all, they are really just selling water at ridiculous prices. All that is needed is some careful propaganda and peer pressure, and the average peoples mindset will change: Drinking tap water makes you a decent human being, drinking bottled water makes you either a pauper, because you live in a place were you cannot trust the water, or a wasteful, irresponsible douche bag.
This is already happening, you likely already have seen it happening.
Plastic has two advantages for manufactures, one is low cost for material so recycling is just not always practical and costs more. Second plastic is light weight so beverage makers can ship more product per truck load then any other material. This is why almost nobody uses glass for beverages in most products. Recycling is so popular now, that much of it is not wanted and simply goes to a landfill anyway. K cups are yet another marvel that thumbs its nose are being earth friendly. But clearly its very popular even among people who probably claim to be saving the earth.
Since we got a new fridge with a good filter in it (Samsung) we no longer buy bottled water. Our straight tap water tastes terrible, but the fridge water tastes great, just like the bottled stuff (better in some cases). There's just no reason for bottled water to exist in the developed world regardless of container material. Our energy would be better spent making efficient and cost-effective water filters. The one in our fridge is like $30 to replace, but it lasts us a year.
Isn't most mass produced American beer basically water anyway?
American beer is low malt. And that malt contains corn and rice in addition to barely, not for cost but for critical differences in local ingredients. This is because American barley is different (six-row) than European-Asian barley (two-row). Our American barley has too high a protein content and makes the beer cloudy if you use a lot of it in your malt.
Once you start making cloudy beer and putting good American hops varieties in them (like the popular Cascade hops) you'll find that American beer styles can be excellent but a distinct style from European beer. American made emulations of European styles can be okay but are never quite the same as the real thing.
Water bottles are made from plastic. Plastic is made from oil. Oil comes from the ground. The excess carbon in the oil we pump up from the ground is becoming CO2 when the oil is burned, causing our climate problems
If we bury the used plastic bottles in landfills, we're just sequestering that carbon back underground. If the plastic is virtually impossible for bacteria to biodegrade, that means it won't be converted into methane or CO2 by bacteria in the landfill, thus guaranteeing that the carbon remains sequestered underground. Where it originally came from.
People have become so conditioned to the idea that "recycling is good for the Earth!", that they no longer stop to think about when recycling might be unnecessary. If, as environmentalists wish, we stop using oil for fuel, then that will mean there will be plenty of oil left to manufacture plastics. So rather than waste a lot of extra energy sorting it and recycling it, just put it back underground where we originally got it from. Use new oil to make new plastics.
The problem is plastics which don't end up in landfills, and instead end up littering our streets, wilderness, rivers, and oceans. So it's pointless requiring companies to come up with new ways to recycle plastic when the problem is the plastic isn't collected in the first place - you can't recycle what isn't collected. All you need to solve the disposal problem is to increase the deposit on each bottle, to encourage the buyer to properly disposes of it after use.
A deposit also encourages homeless and low income people to collect and disposes of bottles which were thrown away improperly. If you think about it, bottle deposits are a way to give financial assistance to these people at zero cost to the government. It's paid for by people who choose to throw their bottles and cans away on the ground, instead of taking them to a collection center. Deposits are win-win-win, with the only losers being people who litter.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but anyone who drinks bottled water where there are other easy alternatives is a huge, lazy douchebag. Bottled water should be reserved only for times when finding an acceptable alternative is difficult...day at the beach, long bike ride, etc. And even then it's not difficult to put some filtered water in a canteen before you leave.
Hell, there's really only one REAL reason I can think of to buy bottled water and that's to put in your SHTF supply cache if you have one. This is a problem that is very easily solved by not being so freaking lazy.
Don't we all just love press releases from the same company? Evian is owned by Danone, which in the Americas is known as Dannon.
Bottled water is more or less a scam anyway, so why not ban it? There are better ways of getting clean water if your water source happens to be dirty. If you want carbonated, then injecting CO2 into water is easy (and fairly cheap if you are willing to DIY).
soylentnews.org
At least one USA company is already selling water in a box. It's not a matter of coming up with something better, it is a matter of slapping a tax or a deposit on something that is undesirable.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Since it doesn't decompose, plastic appears to be more plentiful that other forms of garbage that have the good grace to disappear from sight (either dissolving into the ground, being eaten by bugs or being exhausted from vehicles), even though it represents just as much un-recycled resource.
It is even possible that it has nothing to do with either and is just a backlash against obvious consumerism. Whatever the real reason for all the hate against plastics - surely the most useful class of material ever invented - I feel that if / when the protesters get their way, they will simply turn their wrath against something else.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
other than for marketing, clear plastic isn't needed
What consumer backlash? Sounds like wishful thinking on the part of the article writer, or perhaps something more sinister.
In reality, people just want a) cheap, b) tastes nice, c) convenient, d) not going to kill you. What do you know, they're all applicable to plastic bottles.
Yes, this is one of the reasons that there is no animal life on Earth.
There is what animals will drink to keep themselves alive, then there is what the citizens of developed nations consider "potable" drinking water. The requirements are quite a bit different. We demand no trace of heavy metals or bacteria in our water supply. Naturally occurring aquifers with these specifications are pretty rare.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The slashdot headline, along with the WSJ article headline and lede, use the word crisis. Nothing in the article indicates that there is actually a crisis.
Also - water bottles are cheap, easily cleaned, and reusable. Buy a couple and use filtered tap water instead. You really shouldn't drink soda or beer at home anyway, and you can use a glass at a restaurant if you are that desperate.
The problem is simple, companies have too much say in our government. All the taxpayers will pay for your trash--from stipmine--to landfill--to superfund cleanup--to cancer treatments.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
My little country has extremely high-quality tap water, yet some numpties opt to pay through the nose for bottled. It boggles the mind it really does. But what is Evian in reverse?
How about cleaning up the water supply so tapwater is good enough to drink?
Seriously, as someone who's always lived out in the country with a well, I've always thought purchasing bottled water, no matter what type of container it comes in, to be utterly ridiculous (but then, the average human is a lot dumber than I give him credit for).
Honestly--no exaggeration--I've purchased maybe 3 bottles of water in my life (I'm past my mid-40s)--not cases, but individual bottles--and every time I had to do that I felt dirty about it. I'm no tree hugger, but the whole concept is FUCKING WASTEFUL to me.
....is to make the creators of plastic bottles pay for the clean up. Currently we have a situation where the true cost of products is being hidden because society foots the bill either by degradation of the environment or having to pay for collection and storage and recycling. Including the cost of clean up into the product solves this problem.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
I work at an award-winning landfill. My county encourages recycling and makes it easy to do. That said, plastic water bottles...heck, plastic bottles of any kind are the third worst pollutant, in my opinion. The blow around and last practically forever. The second worst is Styrofoam. You have no idea. At least it eventually disintegrates into tiny little beads, not that those are great but at least they can't be seen. The worst is plastic bags/plastic wraps of all sorts but especially plastic shopping bags. These things blow everywhere eventually become brittle from UV exposure but never truly deteriorate. Solutions? Huge deposit fees, like half the cost of the product. Two dollars for a bottle of water? Make that three but you get a dollar back when you return the bottle. Plastic bags? Similar concept. Dollar a bag, for example, refundable upon return of the bag. Styrofoam? Cellulose packing peanuts that dissolve in water already exist. Let's ramp up that technology and eliminate Styrofoam.
...that is definitely your opinion. ...just an opinion.
And you are welcome to it.
Some might think it an insult.
But it lacks any majesty
(force, that is, or power)
As good as
But no better than
mine or any Other....
I hate to say it but this article reads like a PR/awareness campaign from some environmental group.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the need to recycle, and the fact that bottled water is a ripoff, but there is no consumer backlash, and no crisis. But the article doesnt add any factual information and I cant see any content about the consumer view of plastic. These problems have been growing slowly for years, and most consumers have just gone with the flow.
Oh look - whats this? https://www.aol.com/2011/02/03...
Existing recycling technology needs clean, clear plastic to make new water bottles...
Aside from the obvious trust factor of being able to see what you're drinking, why are bottlers forced to use clear plastic? Seems like an easy solve to expand supply of recycled material.
Why did you even bother to write this? I see no point whatsoever.
Hey, how about this. Why don't Americans clean up their water supply instead of shitting in it? That way you can all then drink tap water out of a glass! Oh but wait....that might....just....put in peril.....JOBS! Ahhhhhhhhh! Any amount of poisoning is better than one person loosing a job!