It’s just so easy. Waiting for the bus to work. Heading to a sunny park in the summer. Getting ready to sit in an airport for three futile hours. It’s all too easy to grab a bottle of water – it’s cheap, it’s cold and clean and it won’t rot your teeth. For many of us it has become the beverage of choice – it seems to make perfect sense.
Sales of bottled water, which was practically unheard of 40 years ago, have skyrocketed over the past 30 years, faster than any other kind of drink. The Beverage Marketing Corporation estimates that US bottled water consumption jumped 25 times from 1976 to 2007, from 354 million gallons to more than 9 billion gallons. Global sales continue to rise about 8 per cent annually, and in developing countries even more – about 18 per cent a year in China. About a fifth of North Americans rely exclusively on bottled water.
