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Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop To DrinkAmerica's unhealthy attachment to spring water.

By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Monday, April 21, 2008, at 7:56 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

Just the other day, it seems, bottled water was a status symbol par excellence. Green glass Perrier bottles studded the Four Seasons like diamonds did the fingers of socialites. Demi Moore and Madonna toted liters of Evian with the aplomb of Jackie Kennedy carrying her Gucci hobo. Rumor had it that Michael Jackson bathed in the stuff. The secret to Raquel Welch's glossy locks? Shampooing with Evian. Madonna even simulated oral sex with an Evian bottle in her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare (NSFW). When it came to spring water, too much was never enough; women's magazines chirped month in and out about water's fabulous health benefits, the "glow" that came from downing a minimum of eight crystalline glasses a day.

But the times they are a-changing. Thanks to the faddish explosion of the green movement, bottled water has become the latest—and purest—symbol of crass conspicuous consumption. To many, Evian no longer denotes fresh-faced purity, but an oily blot on the green earth. Eco-conscious Web sites trumpet headlines like "Five Reasons Not To Drink Bottled Water." Last summer, Gavin Newsom—America's most stylin' mayor—banned the use of San Francisco city funds for bottled water, and this March, Seattle's mayor followed suit. Meanwhile, sales of reusable eco-friendly bottles like Sigg have surged, with the company's revenues in early 2007 skyrocketing 80 percent over the previous year's. While the rejection of bottled water may seem like the latest self-serving eco-fad, at its heart is a reckoning with an ugly truth. Our addiction to water purity is, ironically, making the world—and our water supplies—unhealthier than ever.

Of course, the backlash was probably inevitable. It wasn't that long ago, after all, that Americans were pretty happy with their tap water. Then, in the summer of 1977, Perrier launched a concerted ad campaign in the United States featuring Orson Welles, hoping to catapult its spring water from a niche product (about 2 million bottles sold a year to what Time called "discriminating, well-heeled 'Perrier freaks' ") to a fashion accessory with broad market appeal. The campaign popularized the vague health claims and the appeals to the "mystique" of bubbling-springs-untouched-by-man that would become the de rigueur icons of the mineral-water movement. (Gustave Leven, the company's then-president, said, "Americans will love Perrier because it is nice for your digestion" and dropped hints about its "nonfattening" heart benefits.) Between 1978 and 1979, sales in the United States rose from $20 million to $60 million. And in the '80s, fueled by the burgeoning health craze, mineral water's appeal to celebrities and Wall Street execs as a status-symbol-cum-health-necessity grew sharply. By 1988, Perrier was a juggernaut, selling some 300 million bottles a year; it took a benzene scare to shake its chokehold on the market. At that point, companies like Evian, having already spotted opportunity, were poised to step in and take a piece of the pie.

What no one could have anticipated was just how big that pie would become. As fast as bottled-water sales grew in the 1970s, it's nothing compared with what's happened over the last decade and a half. According to Elizabeth Royte, author of the informative, forthcoming Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, U.S. bottled-water sales actually jumped from $115 million to $4 billion between 1990 and 1997. Global water sales today are estimated to be close to $100 billion. This second leap in growth is due in large part to the development of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). PET is a flexible, durable, light plastic that "revolutionized" the industry, according to the president of Nestlé Waters of North America. Cheaper than polyvinyl chloride bottles, it helped enable a transition from heavy glass packaging to portable plastic. As Charles Fishman aptly put it in Fast Company, the plastic bottle "did for water what the pop-top can had done for soda: It turned water into an anywhere, anytime beverage, at just the moment when we decided we wanted a beverage, everywhere, all the time." Today, estimates suggest that the bottled-water market continues to expand by an astonishing 7 percent a year.

And yet there's nothing benign about that Evian bottle, despite its soothing emanations of purity and good health. In fact, water, more than any other commodity, epitomizes the health troubles created by our convenience-first portable economy. The very thing that allowed the water market to expand—plastics—may be making the world vastly less healthy for all of us. In the first place, contaminants from plastics like PET leach into the ground and the water around us. And evidence is accumulating that the phthalates in flexible plastics such as PET can interfere with our endocrine system at high doses—disrupting the regulation of hormones and leading to imbalances that interfere with reproduction.

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Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor, and she is the author of Halflife, a collection of poetry.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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