Bottlemania
Today’s episode of Marketplace includes an interview with Elizabeth Royte, the author of the new book Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. The book is an investigative look at the bottled water industry and how they marketed their way to becoming an 11 billion dollar industry. From the Marketplace interview…
It took off because of very clever marketing that prayed on our ideas about health and wellness and beauty and weight loss and things like that and we were told that we needed to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate and drink 8 ounce glasses a day and so portability became really important and that marketing worked really, really well. It turned bottled water from a $150 million a year industry in 1990 to a $11.5 billion a year industry in 2007.
Elizabeth goes on to talk a little about the differences between tap water and bottled water…
“I think people really don’t know anything about where their water comes from. People don’t know whether they’re drinking groundwater or surface water, they don’t know what’s in their watershed and they just have a lot of questions about it and they don’t go and find out what’s in there and it’s really easy to find…”
As we prepared to mount our “drink local” campaign at Telluride Bluegrass, we talked with Telluride’s water treatment plant superintendent, Bill Goldsworthy. It turns out the town’s water comes directly from two sources: one that begins above treeline high up in the Mill Creek Basin north of town, where it is collected out of Mill Creek into a small settling pond at 9,600 feet on a ridge just north of the Shell Station on the valley floor. The other source begins at 11,600 feet at the top of Coronet Creek, which feeds the Still Well reservoir, located at 9,500 feet near the Jud Wiebe Trail just off of Tomboy Road. From these two tributaries, it’s a short journey to the treatment plant just west of town, where it is treated and then stored in two 250,000 gallon tanks off of Tomboy Road.
Though both sources require chlorine treatment by federal law, at the Festival we’ll be filtering out the chlorine along with other particles. Our specially-designed filter stations utilize a pair of reasonably-priced commercial filters to assure that the tap tastes even better than the bottle. The filters will be easily visible, along with a water meter, so everyone knows exactly what we’re doing to the water. And so everyone can monitor the scope of this change (using the water meter) away from bottled water.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Just curious, but why did you feel a need to further filter the city’s water? Seems that the extra filtering equipment may actually add to the material waste issues of the festival that you’re putting a good bit of efforts towards reducing (kudos, BTW). Let’s just hope the water’s not being filtered with carbon
June 10th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Thanks for your comment, Chad. We gave this a lot of thought, because as you pointed out the filtering equipment does wear out and the water is safely drinkable right out of the tap.
The town water supply does have a trace of chlorine flavor - a byproduct of their water treatment process. Our filters are designed to remove that chlorine flavor. We decided we really needed to make sure the water tasted every bit as good (or better) than the bottled water so many people are used to.
It’s a transitional step, and maybe in the future we won’t need any filters. But this move away from bottled water is fairly significant (and controversial in some circles), so we’re trying to address all possible objections. As you’ll see, the filters are not very large (we’ll post some photos of the water station after the festival). Their footprint is dwarfed by the number of plastic bottles that would have been used…