豆知识 2011-07-10&07-16 瓶装水的故事 (1/2)

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You see the city of Cleveland didn't like being the butt³ of Fiji's jokes, so they did some tests and guess what? These tests showed a glass of Fiji water is lower quality, it loses taste tests against Cleveland tap, and costs thousands of times more. This story is typical of what happens when you test bottled water against tap water. Is it cleaner? Sometimes, sometimes not. In many ways, bottled water is less regulated than tap. Is it tastier? In taste tests across the country, people consistently choose tap over bottled water. 

 

 

These bottled water companies say they're just meeting consumer demand. But who would demand a less sustainable, less tasty, way more expensive product, especially one you can get for almost free in your kitchen? Bottled water costs about 2000 times more than tap water. Can you imagine paying 2000 times the price of anything else? How about a $10,000 sandwich? 

 

 

Yet people in the U.S. buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week. That is enough to circle the globe more than five times. How did this come to be? Well, it all goes back to how our materials economy works and one of its key drivers, which is known as manufactured demand. 

 

 

If companies want to keep growing, they have to keep selling more and more stuff. In the 1970s, giant soft drink companies got worried as they saw their growth projections⁴ starting to level off. There's only so much soda⁵ a person can drink. Plus it wouldn't be long before people began realizing that soda is not that healthy, and turned back to - gasp⁶! -drinking tap water. 

 

 

Well, the companies found their next big idea in a silly designer product that most people laughed off as a passing yuppie fad⁷. Water is free, people said back then, what will they sell us next, air? So how do you get people to buy this fringe product? Simple. You manufacture demand. How do you do that? Well, imagine you're in charge of a bottled water company. Since people aren't lining⁸ up to trade their hard-earned money for your unnecessary product, you make them feel scared and insecure if they don't have it. And that's exactly what the bottled water industry did. One of their first marketing⁹ tactics was to scare people about tap water, with ads like Fiji's Cleveland campaign. “When we're done,” one top water executive said, “tap water will be relegated¹⁰ to showers and washing dishes.”

 

 

Next, you hide the reality of your product behind images of pure fantasy. Have you ever noticed how bottled water tries to seduce¹¹ us with pictures of mountain streams and pristine nature? But guess where a third of all bottled water in the U.S. actually comes from? The tap! Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani are two of the many brands that are really filtered tap water. But the pristine nature lie goes much deeper. In a recent full page ad, Nestlé said: “Bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.” What?! They are trashing the environment all along the product's life cycle.

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