Tag: bottled water

OM in the News: Plastic Water Bottles Threaten a Crisis

“Bottled water, which recently dethroned soda as America’s most popular beverage, is facing a crisis,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 13, 2018). A consumer backlash against disposable plastic plus new government mandates and bans in many stores have bottled-water makers scrambling to find alternatives.

Workers sort plastic bottles at a Swiss recycling facility

Evian this year pledged to make all its plastic bottles entirely from recycled plastic by 2025, up from 30% today. It hopes 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. (A decade ago, for example, Evian pledged to use 50% recycled plastic in its water bottles by 2009. Nestlé’s plastic water bottles use just 7% recycled material in the U.S., while Coca-Cola’s use 10%, and Pepsi uses 9%.)

Existing recycling technology needs clean, clear plastic to make new water bottles, but low recycling rates and a lack of infrastructure have stymied supply. Danone, Evian’s parent company, is betting its reputation on a new technology that turns old plastic from things like dirty carpets and ketchup bottles into plastic suitable for new water bottles. Less than a third of plastic bottles sold in the U.S. are  now collected for recycling, with less than 1% processed into food-grade plastic. The bottled-water industry says using more recycled plastic in bottles will incentivize the collection of old bottles by giving them value. Companies are launching new marketing campaigns, employing more waste pickers and backing new bottle deposit schemes to encourage recycling.

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. Recently, images of bottles overflowing landfills and threatening sea life have soured consumers. Plastic drink bottles are the 3rd most common type of item found washed up on shorelines—behind cigarette butts and food wrappers.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How is this a triple bottom line issue (people, planet, profit)?
  2. What other consumer products are facing similar backlash crises?

Teaching Tip: The Steep Price of Bottled Water

Indian fishermen pushed their boat through plastic waste last month in Mumbai.
Indian fishermen pushed their boat through plastic waste last month in Mumbai.

Almost all of our students are interested in and concerned about helping to save our planet. So when you cover the subject of Sustainability in Supplement 5, here are some facts that may lead to a lively discussion (from The New York Times–Nov. 1, 2016).

  1. For the first time, bottled water is expected to outsell soft drinks in the U.S. Some 49.4 billion bottles of water were sold here last year, and each is having an effect on the environment.
  2. More than 1/2 of Americans drink bottled water, despite the fact that tap water is free and is generally of very high quality.
  3. Producing a bottle of water uses about 2,000 times as much energy as producing an equivalent amount of tap water.
  4. Most bottles are thrown away after a single use. In the U.S., less than 1/3 are collected  for recycling, even though the plastic in bottles is easy and efficient to recycle. Most plastic waste makes it to recycling facilities or garbage dumps, but a lot ends up in our rivers and lakes.
  5. Eight million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year globally. (As much as 100 million tons of plastic is already floating there, with nearly 1/2 of that from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam).
  6. Environmentalists suggest cutting off the supply at the source now–through better recycling and drinking less bottled water.

In Supplement 5, we discuss sustainability as a matter of corporate social responsibility (CSR). But here is a fun 3-minute on-line quiz designed to measure an individual’s measure of bottled water consumption and social responsibility: nytimes.com/science.