The very nature of bottled water mysteriously reflects the nuances of popular culture. Especially within the past decade or so, the bottled water industry has spawned a teeming mass of sports drinks and enhanced water products that promise every health benefit imaginable. From celebrity endorsements to stylish bottling, companies have established the practice of buying a plastic bottle of water as a norm.
Older generations are baffled at the idea of purchasing a resource that flows freely from their familiar kitchen sinks, while younger generations place their trust in costly containers of water trucked miles away from an unknown "glacial spring" that is always assured to be quite pure.
Those in the environmental community have recently noticed that the dramatic rise in popularity of bottled waters has of course created a problem not only for physical waste, but wasted energy as well. In particular, as Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute (a sustainable development research organization in Oakland, Ca.) notes in remarks to the Woodrow Wilson Center (www.wilsoncenter.org), the resource use required to create bottled water is over consumptive: it takes about three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water. In addition, the industry itself in the United States uses 17 million barrels of oil annually to make water bottles.
As consumers of the 21st century, the immediate inconvenience of recycling all those plastic bottles is much too great for the majority of society to handle, and thus they are filling the landfills: according to the Container Recycling Institute, less than 20 percent of water bottles are recycled in the United States.
Peter Thum, the founder of Ethos Water, began the company as a way to market a stylish bottle of water to a market that had already proven to shell out considerable amounts of money for high-end bottled water, with the motivation of working towards giving children in impoverished countries clean water. The implications of buying a socially conscious water bottle, Thum hoped, would be enough to draft him successful business revenue. After several tortuous, labor intensive years, he attracted the attention of the Starbucks executives.
A catch-22 arises from this situation. While the capitalistic venture of Peter Thum cannot be dismissed as frivolous or evil, it presents a moral dilemma that the truly socially conscious consumer must consider carefully. The simple convenience of purchasing a bottle of water that will contribute $0.05 towards a nonprofit organization in Africa working towards getting children clean water makes you feel better about your purchase and your daily requirement of cosmopolitanism is satisfied. However, the very purchase of that bottle of water fuels a gluttonous, profit-driven industry and leads to greater global environmental problems.
Which is the greater evil? Not contributing towards a more than worthy cause, and denying assistance to an effort that would help children have a better life or participating in an act that has environmental repercussions that will last further than our lifetimes. In this case, social responsibility appears to be strangely conditional: if you're going to make the poor environmental decision to purchase a bottle of water, make it count in the life of a child by choosing Ethos instead of something owned by Coke or Pepsi. And maybe, just maybe, choose to recycle.
Amy Biolchinibiolchal@muohio.edu
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