HOT SPRINGS — Breck Speed hates this sort of thing.

“The Natural Resources Defense Council
has estimated that bottled water is between 240 and 10,000 more times
expensive than tap water. For Coca-Cola’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina,
products drawn from municipal taps, this price markup is astonishing.
[Dasani is drawn from Little Rock’s municipal taps.] Nestle pays little
for the water it takes out of groundwater streams and aquifers. Bottled
water is quite simply water transformed into water. … Bottled-water
plants are likely to be inspected only once every four to five years.
Public water systems like New York City’s exemplary one undergo
stringent checks every four hours.”

That was Karl Flecker writing in The
American Prospect magazine under the headline, “Backlash Against
Bottled Water,” and there’s only one part of it Speed agrees with: A
backlash against bottled water is indeed under way. It’s an undeserved,
misguided backlash, in Speed’s view, but real nonetheless.

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“Three groups of people have come out
against bottled water over the last 18 months,” Speed says. “There’s
the municipal water people, the mayors and the waterworks
commissioners. They’re afraid that if people are happy drinking bottled
water, they won’t be willing to spend money on maintaining and
improving city water supplies. Then there are the environmentalists,
like the Sierra Club. They see all plastic as evil. [Most bottled water
is sold in plastic bottles. The Natural Resources Defense Council is an
environmental group also.] Third, you have the people who sell home
filtration systems.” Some of these groups don’t sound like natural
allies, Speed notes. “But you know what they say: ‘The enemy of my
enemy is my friend.’ ”

Speed is the chairman and chief
executive officer of Mountain Valley Spring Company, whose principal
product is Mountain Valley Spring Water. “America’s Premium Bottled
Water” is its slogan. He does his chairing and executing in a handsome
old building on Central Avenue. “America’s Premium Bottled Water
Offices,” we’d bet. The first floor is open to tourists.

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But the headquarters is under fire,
figuratively, and from up close as well as long-range. One of the
mayors who’s spoken out against bottled water is Dan Coody of
Fayetteville. Just returned from a national mayors conference
in New York, Coody called a press conference a few weeks ago to ask
Fayetteville residents to drink tap water instead of bottled water. One
of his objections is to the environmental pollution of discarded
bottles. The Sierra Club says that Americans throw away 30 million
water bottles a day, and that only 13 percent of water bottles are
reused or recycled.

Eleven states have “bottle bills,”
requiring consumers to put up a deposit, usually a nickel a bottle. The
deposit is returned when the bottle is returned for recycling. A bottle
bill was introduced in the Arkansas legislature a few years back. The
bottlers crushed it. Grocers also objected to the bill, saying they had
no place to store returned bottles, and that empty soft-drink bottles
draw flies. Coody supported that bill. He knows of no plans for another.

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Speed agrees that “too much”
bottled-water packaging is discarded. “The Sierra Club would find
natural allies in the bottled-water business,” he says. “Most of us are
Greens as well. You’ll find huge support for recycling in our
industry.” Where was that support when a bottle bill was before the
Arkansas legislature?

Bottle bills don’t solve the litter
problem, Speed says. “If you really want to do the job, you have to
have mandatory curbside recycling.” That way, he says, not only can the
bottles be saved for recycling, but so can the cardboard, and the
peanut butter jars, “and all that huge amount of stuff we throw away.
If it’s a good idea, let’s capture all that stuff.”

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Many places, including Little Rock,
have voluntary curbside recycling programs. Mandatory programs are
rare. Seattle has one, according to Speed. “If you don’t separate your
garbage, they fine you.”

But, if Arkansas should enact a bottle
bill, Mountain Valley will do what has to be done, he said. “We deal
with a lot of bottle bills now.”

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Speed takes more umbrage at suggestions
by Coody — or anyone else — that tap water is somehow cleaner, more
closely monitored, more drinkable than bottled water. “He really
doesn’t want to go there,” Speed says. “We’ve never done the negative
sale against tap water. But tap water is truly not the same quality as
bottled water.”

He notes that in Fayetteville and many
other cities, including Little Rock, there are times when the city
government has to tell consumers that while the city water may look,
smell and/or taste funny, it’s all right to use. “Can you imagine a
bottled-water company trying to communicate that message to its
customers? We’d be out of business in a minute.”

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Bottled water is regulated by the
federal Food and Drug Administration. Tap water is regulated by the
federal Environmental Protection Agency. In Arkansas, the state Health
Department enforces the federal regulations. As a starter, bottled
water must meet the same EPA standards required of tap water, Speed
says. Then the FDA imposes stricter requirements of its own — on the
amount of lead that’s permitted, for one.

Speed says some municipal water systems
get good water — from a lake, say — and others get water that’s not so
good, that might be filled with algae, for example. Most bottled-water
companies, including Mountain Valley, use a protected natural spring or
deep well as a source, he says. But even those companies who use tap
water, like his competitor, Dasani, “take great care to purify it with
highly sophisticated filtration processes before putting it in a
sanitized, sealed bottle.”   

The mayors are being disingenuous when
they talk about how often their water is tested, Speed says. “It’s not
the water they’re testing, it’s the distribution system, the pipes.
They’re required by the EPA to test throughout the system. We don’t
have to do that. Our water is in a sealed bottle.”

He once wrote in an article for an Arkansas newspaper:

“Americans should be neither limited in
their water options nor shamed by public figures or interest groups
with special agendas for making a choice that is best for them and
their families. This is not a close call. The choice to drink bottled
water is a healthy one, and a lot better than the option of minimally
tested, chlorinated, flocculated, often fluoridated,
transmitted-through-old-pipe municipal tap water.”

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It sounds almost like a negative sale.

 

“I remember when bottled water was just
getting started on a big scale in the ‘80s,” says Graham Rich, CEO of
Central Arkansas Water. “I said that’ll never work, people won’t pay
for water. It’s a good thing I’m not in marketing.”

A lot of very sharp people are in
marketing, though, and bottled water is now one of the great success
stories of American salesmanship. Eskimos keep bottled water in their
refrigerators. In 1980, U.S. consumption of bottled water was 605
million gallons. By 1989, it was 2,029,400 gallons. In 2007, it was
8,823,000 gallons, which amounted to $11,705,900 in sales.

Despite that remarkable growth, Rich
isn’t worried that his own operation will be driven out of business.
CAW provides water to Little Rock, North Little Rock and other Central
Arkansas municipalities.

“I don’t consider them [bottled water]
competition at all,” Rich says. “I think it’s a personal choice. When I
drink bottled water, it’s more of a portability issue.” Anyway, less
than one percent of tap water is consumed by humans. The rest goes to
flush toilets, water lawns, wash cars, supply industry.

“If you took out the container issue,
bottled water is a good alternative — better than drinks containing
caffeine and sugar,” Rich says, still friendly. CAW bottles some water
of its own, but not for sale. The CAW bottled water is distributed at
promotional events, and delivered to disaster areas. Of the container
issue, Rich says “Anything that would force recycling is a great thing.”

He doesn’t underrate his own product.
The federal government requires CAW to publish an annual water quality
report. The latest report says, “At CAW, we take great care in making
sure that your drinking water is safe from the source to the tap. Our
laboratory and operations personnel conduct more than 155,000 tests —
an average of 425 tests a day, 365 days a year — on the various stages
of the treatment and delivery process. … Our mission is to provide you
with exceptional service and the best water quality possible at a fair
price.” Price, yes. That’s a big plus for tap water.

“You can buy a pint of water for 69
cents at a convenience store,” Rich says. “Most of the cost is in the
container, the labeling and the distribution. Central Arkansas Water
charges $1.85 for a thousand gallons, inside the city.”

And — an unsolicited testimonial — many
people like the taste of Little Rock’s water. Taste, Rich observes, is
subjective, but “I’ve worked for five other water utilities and Central
Arkansas Water is the best-tasting of those.”

Marie Crawford, CAW’s director of
communications, says “A lot of people tell us they bottle Little Rock
tap water and take it with them on trips.”

 

Robert Hart is director of the
Engineering Section of the state Health Department. The Department
inspects tap and bottled water to see that it meets the federal
requirements.

“This issue of bottled water versus tap
water has been around for a long time,” Hart says. “I don’t see where
there has to be this tension. When a public system is having problems,
like a natural disaster, we recommend that people use bottled water.
Some people use bottled water for taste, but most people, including
myself, use bottled water more for convenience. Drinking bottled water
instead of sugary drinks is a good thing.”

But as for bottled water being cleaner,
safer to drink, Hart says “I think tap water is every bit as clean.”
What about Speed’s argument that municipal water sometimes looks,
smells or tastes funny, and that bottled water couldn’t get by with
that? “He’s accurate as far as he goes. But people are charging a
fraction of a penny per gallon for public water. It may not always meet
certain aesthetic standards.”

Like Hart and Rich, Speed too says that
bottled water and tap water shouldn’t be at war. He too points out that
only a small percentage of tap water is used for human consumption. He
considers Diet Coke, not tap water, to be Mountain Valley’s single
biggest competitor.

Still, there is some inherent
competition between bottled water and tap water, and it’s there, in
part, because the demand for bottled water is a manufactured demand.
What marketing made fashionable, marketing can make unfashionable, and
sometimes that’s a good thing. Marketing helped make tobacco unpopular,
and overt racism.

No matter how convenient bottled water
may be, much of its appeal depends on beliefs that drinking bottled
water is chic, that it tastes better and/or is better for you than tap
water, and that discriminating people know all this. If you want to be
a princess, you have to be able to feel the pea. And, there’s the
thrill of conspicuous consumption: “I can pay for water, and you can’t.”

Should anyone succeed in refuting these beliefs, the sales of bottled water probably would decline.     

The comic magicians Penn and Teller did
a cable television show in which they persuaded a California restaurant
to use a “water steward” who’d supposedly help diners in the same way a
wine steward does. The “water steward” had fancy bottles; he made
recommendations; customers raved over waters that were so much better
than what they could get from a faucet at home. But that’s exactly what
they were getting. Penn and Teller were filling the bottles from a hose
on the restaurant patio.

That sort of demonstration, repeated
often and conspicuously enough, might affect bottled-water sales. Or it
might not. There’s some evidence that American consumers would rather
look dumb than undiscriminating. 

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