So, Where Does Bottled Water Come From?
There are three most common bottled water sources: municipal tap water, natural springs, and wells.
Municipal Tap Water
Some bottled water is simply branded tap water. However, the tap water will have usually been filtered, purified, or enhanced with minerals or electrolytes to give it a cleaner, more pleasant taste. Many companies use distillation or reverse osmosis to filter tap water.
Natural Springs
Water from natural springs is derived from – you guessed it – natural springs, either above-ground surface water sources or below-ground groundwater sources. Bottled spring water from a spring can’t be modified or treated if the brand wants to advertise the product as “bottled water”.
Wells
Well water is extracted from an aquifer deep underground. Well water often contains a higher mineral content than tap water, but water from wells is more at risk of containing contaminants like bacteria, and must be treated before it’s bottled.
Source: https://waterfilterguru.com/where-does-bottled-water-come-from/
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Market statistics
- Revenue in the Bottled Water segment amounts to US$302.50bn in 2022. The market is expected to grow annually by 8.03% (CAGR 2022-2026).
- In global comparison, most revenue is generated in the United States (US$83.02bn in 2022).
- In relation to total population figures, per person revenues of US$39.74 are generated in 2022.
- By 2026, 36% of spending and 9% of volume consumption in the Bottled Water segment will be attributable to out-of-home consumption (e.g., in bars and restaurants).
- In the Bottled Water segment, volume is expected to amount to 509,591.9ML by 2026. The Bottled Water segment is expected to show a volume growth of 6.3% in 2023.
- The average volume per person in the Bottled Water segment is expected to amount to 58.68 L in 2022
Source: https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/non-alcoholic-drinks/bottled-water/worldwide
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The fight to stop Nestlé from taking America’s water to sell in plastic bottles
Creek beds are bone dry and once-gushing springs are reduced to trickles as fights play out around the nation over control of nation’s freshwater supply
The network of clear streams comprising California’s Strawberry Creek run down the side of a steep, rocky mountain in a national forest two hours east of Los Angeles. Last year Nestlé siphoned 45m gallons of pristine spring water from the creek and bottled it under the Arrowhead Water label.
Though it’s on federal land, the Swiss bottled water giant paid the US Forest Service and state practically nothing, and it profited handsomely: Nestlé Waters’ 2018 worldwide sales exceeded $7.8bn.
Conservationists say some creek beds in the area are now bone dry and once-gushing springs have been reduced to mere trickles. The Forest Service recently determined Nestlé’s activities left Strawberry Creek “impaired” while “the current water extraction is drying up surface water resources”.
Meanwhile, the state is investigating whether Nestlé is illegally drawing from Strawberry Creek and in 2017 advised it to “immediately cease any unauthorized diversions”. Still, a year later, the Forest Service approved a new five-year permit that allows Nestlé to continue using federal land to extract water, a decision critics say defies common sense.
Strawberry Creek is emblematic of the intense, complex water fights playing out around the nation between Nestlé, grassroots opposition, and government officials. At stake is control of the nation’s freshwater supply and billions in profits as Nestlé bottles America’s water then sells it back in plastic bottles. Those in opposition, such as Amanda Frye, an author and nutritionist, increasingly view Nestlé as a corporate villain motivated by “greed”.
“These are people who just want to make money, but they’ve already dried up the upper Strawberry Creek and they’ve done a lot of damage,” she said. “They’re a foreign corporation taking our natural resources, which makes it even worse.”
Critics characterize Nestlé as a “predatory” water company that targets struggling communities with sometimes exaggerated job promises while employing a variety of cheap strategies, like donating to local boy scouts, to win over small town officials who hold the keys to valuable springs.
Its spending on lobbying and campaign contributions at the federal and state levels totals in the millions annually, the revolving door between the company and government perpetually turns, and it maintains cozy relationships with federal officials from the Forest Service to Trump administration.
Such tactics are partly what’s behind the Forest Service’s Strawberry Creek decision to allow Nestlé to pull water from federal land, said Michael O’Heaney, director of the Berkeley-based environmental group Story of Stuff Project, which has sued to stop Nestlé.
Should water be commodified and sold by private industry, or is it a basic human right?
“You have Nestlé spouting this idea of shared benefits and ‘We’re in it for the communities’, but when you see the way they operate on the ground – they’re very skilled at cozying up with legislators, state officials … and getting their way,” he said.
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While Nestlé extracts millions of litres from their land, residents have no drinking water
Just 90 minutes from Toronto, residents of a First Nations community try to improve the water situation as the beverage company extracts from their land
The mysterious rash on the arm of six-year-old Theron wouldn’t heal. For almost a year, his mother, Iokarenhtha Thomas, who lives in the Six Nations of the Grand River indigenous reserve in Ontario, went to the local doctor for lotions for the boy. It worked, for a time. But the itchy red rash always returned. Thomas came to suspect the culprit behind the rash: water – or, rather, the lack of it.
Thomas, a university student and mother of five, has lived without running tap water since the age of 16. Her children lack access to things commonplace elsewhere, like toilets, showers and baths. For washing and toilet usage, they use a bucket.
It is a challenging existence, full of frustration, exhaustion and health problems, and reminiscent of life in some developing countries. But this is not the “third world”. It is Canada, which regularly ranks as one of the United Nations’ top places in the world to live. Moreover, this Native community is located in prosperous southern Ontario, 90 minutes from Canada’s largest and richest city, Toronto.
Meanwhile, while Thomas and her family do without water, the beverage company Nestlé extracts millions of litres of water daily from Six Nations treaty land.
Twice a week, Thomas and her husband grab jugs, pails and whatever else they have in the house, and drive 8km to a public tap to fill up. The water isn’t drinkable, however, so once a week they also drive 10km to the nearest town, Caledonia, to buy bottled water to drink.
“When my husband isn’t here, it makes it difficult to do the dishes or anything because I don’t have the strength to carry all the jugs of water,” Thomas said.
“When I start to compare my life to someone who isn’t living on reserve, I start feeling angry at the government,” she said. “Because our people don’t have running water. But that’s just the reality of living on reserve. You grow up being treated unfairly.”
Each container of the store-bought bottled water weighs more than 40lb, so a little over a year ago, Thomas, a slight, willowy woman, began supplementing them with rainwater collected from her rooftop gutters. She would have continued had it not been for her son’s rashes, later diagnosed as impetigo, which she believes came from bacteria on the roof’s shingles. “It made me feel like a bad mother to know that he had all these skin issues from washing with [rain] water.”
That’s just the reality of living on reserve. You grow up being treated unfairly
Ninety-one percent of the homes in this community aren’t connected to the water treatment plant, says Michael Montour, director of public works for Six Nations. Some, like the Thomas home, have no water at all. Others have water in their taps, but it is too polluted to drink.
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Michigan OKs Nestlé Water Extraction, Despite 80K+ Public Comments Against It
Steven M. Herppich /AFP/Getty Images
n a much-watched case, a Michigan agency has approved Nestlé’s plan to boost the amount of water it takes from the state. The request attracted a record number of public comments — with 80,945 against and 75 in favor.
Nestlé’s request to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to pump 576,000 gallons of water each day from the White Pine Springs well in the Great Lakes Basin was “highly controversial,” member station Michigan Radio reports. But despite deep public opposition, the agency concluded that the company’s plan met with legal standards.
“It is very clear this permit decision is of great interest to not only residents in the surrounding counties, but to Michiganders across the state as well,” MDEQ Director C. Heidi Grether said in approving the permit.
“In full transparency, the majority of the public comments were in opposition of the permit,” Grether added, “but most of them related to issues of public policy which are not, and should not be, part of an administrative permit decision.”
Under the plan, Nestlé will be approved to pump up to 400 gallons of water per minute from the well, rather than the 250 gallons per minute it had been extracting. The company first applied for the new permit in July 2016.
“The state says Nestlé has to complete a monitoring plan and submit it to the DEQ for approval,” MR reports of the 58-page final memo from the Michigan agency.
Water is a complicated and sore subject in many areas, but in few places more so than in Michigan, where a crisis has raged for years over high levels of lead and other dangerous heavy metals in the water in Flint. And back in 2014, Detroit resorted to shutting off water to thousands of customers as it fought bankruptcy.
With that recent history as a backdrop, Nestlé’s plan to boost the amount of water it takes from the Great Lakes State drew attention and added another dimension to a debate over whether water should be seen as a commodity, a commercial product — or a human right.
Nestlé’s well is in western Michigan, near the town of Evart, as Michigan Radio’s Lindsey Smith reported on The Environment Report podcast. The company bottles the water for sale under its Ice Mountain label.
To get through the massive and unprecedented public response for comment, Smith said, the state’s environmental quality department created categories of responses, after reading several thousand of them. The resulting themes dealt with a range of ideas, from the potential environmental damage of the water plan to calls for a public vote on the increase.
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Videos
Our production partners on the bottled water film include five leading sustainability groups: Corporate Accountability International, Environmental Working Group, Food & Water Watch, Pacific Institute, and Polaris Institute.
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HERE’S HOW NESTLE IS LEAVING MILLIONS IN PAKISTAN, NIGERIA AND FLINT WITHOUT CLEAN WATER
If you really want to help Muslims in developing countries, boycott Nestle.
1.2 billion people in the world lack clean drinking water. Pakistan may run out of water by 2025, while 15 out of 21 million Nigerians have no clean water access. In North America, Flint, Michigan residents will not have clean drinking water until 2020, while California is in a seemingly permanent drought. Why then, are these regions’ governments selling natural water resources to Nestle, a private, European corporation, which then bottles and sells the water? In case you didn’t know, Nestle is literally hoarding water from around the world to bottle and sell for a huge profit – in Pakistan, Africa, even in the United States. Nestle got the memo that clean, natural water resources are drying out, and they are buying them up (for as little as $200). Ironically, the communities that live the closest to their water plants are suffering the most.
Of course, the worst affected are the already poor and hungry regions of the world, like Lahore, Pakistan. Nestle’s Pakistan plant was censured for not providing drinking water to the local community in 2015. In 2013, reports came that thousands of Pakistanis in the Bhati Diwan village were getting sick by being forced to drink sludge water, as Nestle drained their water supply for their bottled water. Dirty drinking water causes malaria, even death. Nestle was actually selling this water back to Pakistanis while denying the citizens access to it. Since 1998, Nestle has been selling Pure Life bottled water in Lahore, planting doubt in the region about the tap water’s cleanliness, and leading the government to neglect the cleanliness of the tap water. Similarly, many North Americans, including myself, now reach for a water bottle and are hesitate to drink tap water.
We often see heartbreaking photos of children in Africa walking for miles to fill a bucket of clean water. Nestle has been buying out water resources in Nigeria for the past 50 years, according to Premium Times. In fact, Bloomberg reports water shortages in Nigeria have killed more people than Boko Haram (approximately 7,000). This problem is not unique to developing countries: activists and communities are fighting Nestle for water in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Specifically, in Michigan, 100,000 residents only have access to poisonous drinking water. Since 2014, 12,000 children were exposed to lead, and 10 people have died. They have to drink bottled water until 2020… but did you know that Michigan’s governor (who has personal ties to Nestle), sold Michigan’s clean water reserves for Nestle’s private use?
At least in the majority of situations, these modernized, rich countries have successful resources and funding to successfully fight sneaky corporations, while villagers in places such as Pakistan, Nigeria, are voiceless, defenceless, and worse yet, completely unaware.
THE WORLD’S WATER SHORTAGE IS SERIOUS, BUT IT’S PREVENTABLE.
Corporations like Nestle need to stop hoarding water; and city, state, and national governments and institutions need to stop selling it to them. If you have not heard anything lately about this crisis, it’s because of Nestle propaganda. After effective campaigns by watchdog groups SumofUS.org and MoveOn in 2013, public outcry led Nestle to drown media headlines with their ‘philanthropic’ efforts. But why would countries filled with natural water resources need a European corporation to give them bottled water? Is it because that foreign company owns all of theirs? Governments motivated by funding and industrial growth sell water resources to Nestle but ignore the harmful effects on their communities.
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Nestlé’s Troubled Waters
End the extraction and return the people’s water to public control!
About This Campaign
For decades, Nestlé Waters – the world’s largest water bottler – has bought up access to public water across North America to turn our most precious public resource into a private commodity.
Paying next to nothing in royalties, Nestlé makes billions of dollars a year selling our water. In communities across North America, the pattern repeats itself: Nestlé enters a local town making promises of local job opportunities and the highest sustainability and environmental standards to its water bottling operations. Over time the surrounding communities see a trail of broken promises, environmental degradation and a struggle to regain access to their dwindling water supplies.
Nestlé is now seeking a final pay-off by selling off its North American bottled water brands to private equity profiteers in a more than $4 billion deal. Yet despite this sale, Nestlé continues to fight for extensions and expansions to its water permits across an entire continent in an effort to package a profitable business venture for the next corporation.
In the context of a global pandemic and increasing droughts and wildfires across North America, it’s clearer than ever that water should be owned by and for the people. All too often over recent years, we’ve seen water being privatized and sold in plastic packaging that’s accelerating a waste crisis instead.
Over recent years, The Story of Stuff Project has supported and partnered with communities across the US and Canada fighting to take back public control of their water. We’re shining a spotlight on five of Nestlé’s bottling operations that have generated fierce backlash resulting from the impact to the surrounding communities and their ecosystems.
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10 Largest Bottled Water Companies In The World
The 10 largest bottled water companies in the world have managed to succeed in the bottled water industry, which is on the rise around the world as more and more people become aware of the harmful effects of carbonated drinks and sugary sodas. A report by Beverage Marketing said that bottled water sales grew by an impressive 120% between 2000 and 2015, while consumption of carbonated beverages slid by 16% during the same period. COO of Beverage Marketing, Gary A. Hemphill, predicts that bottled water consumption will surpass that of carbonated drinks in three or four years. The global bottled water market is expected to reach $279.65 billion in 2020, according to Transparency Market Research. Famous carbonated beverage companies are now counting on their bottled water businesses to counteract the declines in their traditional soda businesses as a result. For example, PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE:PEP)’s carbonated beverage sales declined by 2% in the first three quarters of 2015, while its bottled water sales grew by 5.5% in the same period.
Bottled mineral water sales are rising because people consider them healthy and nutritious. Mineral water has just the right amounts of silica, magnesium, potassium and calcium, which is good for bones, skin and blood cholesterol levels. Clean drinking water is still at a premium around the world, especially in the third world, where thousands of people die every year due to water bacteria. Even in the U.S and Europe, it’s hard to trust the quality of tap water amid withering infrastructure and sewage crises. Decades-old pipes are seething with lead and other harmful metals, which get dissolved with water, making tap water potentially toxic to humans. There’s also the controversial addition of fluoride to the tap water in many regions, ostensibly to combat tooth decay, though the onus should be on people to take care of their own teeth as opposed to mass fluoridation of the water supply.
That’s why people are ready to buy bottled water in greater numbers than ever before, despite it costing 2,000 times as much as tap water. In the U.S alone, the equivalent of 1.7 billion half-liter bottles were sold every week in 2015, which is more than five bottles of water for every man, woman, and child in the country. And the U.S doesn’t even top the list of countries consuming bottled water.
In 2015, China overtook the U.S as the world’s top consumer of bottled water. India is also one of the biggest bottled water markets in the world. According to a report by Zenith International, Asia accounted for 41% of the total bottled water market in 2015, up from 35% in 2011.
But bottled water is not without its critics. Several reports have suggested that bottled water is not healthy and contains dissolved solids, which are harmful for health. CBS recently quoted Mike Jackson, a water testing expert at Gold Medal Plumbing, who, while testing three famous bottled water brands, found an average TDS (total dissolved solids) of 170 to 180 PPM. These materials can be dangerous for human health.
Nevertheless, a plethora of bottled water brands are emerging around the world. In this article we will reveal the 10 largest bottled water companies in the world, based on their revenue. For further water-related reading, check out the Top 10 Healthiest Bottled Water in the World.
10. Bisleri International
Bisleri International is an Indian bottled water company, which holds 60% market share in the Indian packaged water industry. Its total bottled water revenue is $94.6 million. The company was founded by famous Italian businessman and chemist Felice Bisleri.
9. Fiji Natural Artesian Water
Fiji Artesian Water ranks 9th in our list of largest bottled water companies in the world. It was founded by Canadian businessman David Gilmour in 1996. The company was then acquired by Las Vegas-based The Wonderful Company LLC, formerly Roll Global, for $50 million in 2004. The Wonderful Company has net revenue of over $4.8 billion, while Fiji Water’s revenue as of the end of 2015 was $250 million. Fiji Water’s sources include the Yaqara Valley of Viti Levu, one of Fiji’s two principal islands.
8. China Resources Beverage
China Resources Beverage is a part of China Resources, which manufactures and sells bottled water, tea, coffee and soft drinks. Its total revenue is $332.6 million. In 2015, China Resources was ranked 115th on the Fortune 500 list. It is one of the biggest state-owned enterprises in China.
7. Aquafina
Aquafina is PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE:PEP)’s bottled water brand, which was started in 1994 in Kansas. It is now sold throughout the world, including in Asia, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. As of May 2015, Aquafina has 9.6% market share in the bottled water industry in the U.S. In 2009, Pepsi had to pay $1.26 billion to Charles Joyce and James Voigt after they won a lawsuit which claimed that Pepsi stole their idea of selling purified bottled water. Pepsi’s market cap as of May 2016 stands at $147.3 billion, while Aquafina’s revenue for 2015 was $1.27 billion.
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Book
Dr. Peter Gleick is a leading scientist, innovator, and communicator on global water and climate issues. He co-founded the Pacific Institute in Oakland, one of the most innovative, independent non-governmental organizations addressing the connections between the environment and global sustainability.
Dr. Gleick’s work has redefined water from the realm of engineers to the world of sustainability, human rights, and integrated thinking. Gleick pioneered the concept of the “soft path for water,” developed the idea of “peak water,” and has written about the need for a “local water movement.” Among many other honors, Gleick received the prestigious MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, the U.S. Water Prize, and has been named “a visionary on the environment” by the BBC. He was elected in 2006 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization
https://www.gleick.com/
Bottled and Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last one hundred years—and why we are poorer for it. It’s a big story and water is big business. Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottle of water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one of those bottles away. That adds up to more than thirty billion bottles a year and tens of billions of dollars of sales.
Are there legitimate reasons to buy all those bottles? With a scientist’s eye and a natural storyteller’s wit, Gleick investigates whether industry claims about the relative safety, convenience, and taste of bottled versus tap hold water. And he exposes the true reasons we’ve turned to the bottle, from fearmongering by business interests and our own vanity to the breakdown of public systems and global inequities.
