Who needs eight cases of bottled water?

I saw these stacked outside the door of an apartment in Redmond, Washington. This is a city with clean tap water available to all residents. If you really don't trust it, you can get a filter. If you want water you can take with you anywhere, there are reusable water bottles. Just fill them from the tap or your filtered water source, and off you go.

If you're a regular reader of my blog, I imagine you already know all this, but seeing those stacked cases of water bottles is a reminder that so many people don't. If everyone stopped buying bottled water, the stores would stop selling it.

But what do you say to people who insist on buying large quantities of water packaged in plastic bottles? I don't know these people. I'm not going to knock on a random door and ask, “Why are you buying cases of bottled water?”

Maybe they moved here from Flint, Michigan, or another place where they didn’t feel safe drinking city water. Perhaps they don’t realize that much bottled water comes from municipal sources. They have bought into the myth that bottled water is safer or healthier than tap water.

I noticed another thing about the bottled water in front of the Redmond apartment. There is a logo that says “Eco-Fina bottles.” It comes with a friendly chasing triangle symbol. Perhaps the people who live in this apartment feel good that they're buying “eco-friendly” water bottles.

What on earth does Eco-Fina mean? I looked it up. Pepsi introduced the concept back in 2009. The company boasted that the new Aquafina bottle weighed only 10.9 grams, using half the plastic of the previous design. A press release claimed these bottles would save 75 million pounds of plastic annually.

I can tell Pepsi how to reduce annual plastic use by another 75 million pounds or more. Stop selling plastic water bottles. According to Statista, 583 billion PET bottles were produced worldwide in 2021. At 10.9 grams per bottle, that’s 14 billion pounds! The total includes all sorts of PET bottles, but it’s still overwhelming.

Eco-Fina is a prime example of greenwashing. None of the world’s largest beverage manufacturers have human health or the environment as their top priority. Their allegiance is to their shareholders. If bottling their products in plastic keeps profit margins high, that’s what they will do. But they will bow to public pressure. If customers aren’t buying, the manufacturers will change their products or their packaging to stay in business.

The answer to plastic pollution isn’t to make single-use plastic water bottles lighter. It is to phase them out. Spread the word.