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Comment by aurelium | Hacker News Reader

The plant locations should probably tighten up their water laws so that they're getting at least something back from Nestle, but the real wrongdoers in this scheme might be the consumers ...

There's a worrying number of people in the world living in places with perfectly potable water, but who insist on drinking only environmentally-damaging bottled water through some superstitious belief that it's better for them.

If Nestle didn't have such a lucrative market to fleece, Nestle's profits would be far less impressive.

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> There's a worrying number of people in the world living in places with perfectly potable water, but who insist on drinking only environmentally-damaging bottled water through some superstitious belief that it's better for them.

It always seems odd that bottled water gets trashed a lot more than bottled soda, when soda is both worse for the consumer's health, and probably has a higher environmental footprint (since it's not just the water, but the water plus whatever sweeteners and chemicals get added).

True, soda doesn't taste the same as tap water, but bottled water doesn't taste the same as tap water a lot of the time, either. Some people also prefer the convenience of buying a bottle of water, and it would seem strange to say: "Hey, it's fine to buy something in the bottle if you're doing so for the flavor, but if you're doing so for the sake of convenience, that's terrible."

If every house had a Coke faucet that could supply limitless supplies of soda nearly free, your argument might be more appropriate.

You'll find plenty of people arguing against sodas in threads that talk about soda, this one, however is about the water, no one is suggesting that soda is a better alternative.

You seem to have missed the two reasons I gave for why people may want to buy bottled water. Yes, people have faucets, but the water coming out of your tap often tastes different from the water you buy (yes, it might also be coming out of a tap, but there are many taps across the U.S. with varying taste). And there are various levels of purification - if people really believe that tap water is exactly the same as purified water, then home water filters are an enormous scam. But I've never heard anyone argue that.

Another reason people might buy a bottle of water is because of convenience - if someone's taking a long drive, for example, it's easier to buy a bottle of water at a gas station and drink it periodically than pull over every time they want to drink.

The reason I bring up soda is because there's sometimes less animosity towards soda than bottled water. Some schools will even ban bottled water, but allow bottled soda[1] - naturally leading to an increase in the less healthy option.

[1] http://grist.org/article/plastic-water-bottle-ban-leads-to-u...

When I lived in a house with water that had a weird chlorinated taste, I bought an under-sink filter that rendered the water tasteless. 3000 gallons per filter, or around 24,000 bottles worth. Or around a penny per gallon (including the faucet dispenser.... about a third of that for the filter only)

When I go for a drive, I take a refillable bottle with me, and generally fill it up at the hotel in the morning. Though I will admit to buying a bottled water from time to time.

But I don't think that a significant percentage of the 50 billion water bottles sold every year are going to people that don't have convenient access to tap water.

I guess this is what I don't understand. Whenever this comes up, people usually act as if bottled water is no different than what comes out of people's taps. As the conversation goes on, though, people start talking about the filtration systems they've bought, or about having the water tested.

If we all know that tap water in many cases isn't the equivalent of filtered water, or that tap water can vary from location to location, why do these conversation invariably always start by pretending that there's no difference between bottled water and water straight from someone's tap?

I live in the SF Bay area now and use no filter and the water is fine.

My parents have a well and when they were concerned with their water they subscribed to a water delivery service that dropped off reusable 5 gallon bottles every couple weeks that is still orders of magnitude better than individual bottles. (Each 5 gallon bottle replaces 40 16 oz bottles and is refilled)

One of their neighbors installed a big (200 gallon?) water tank and hired a service to refill it. My parents ultimately ended up installing a filtering system when it became clear that the well wasn't going to get better. Which would have been cheaper that the water deliveries long term, but less than 2 years later the city ended up bringing municipal water to their neighborhood.

There are lots of more environmentally friendly alternatives to single serve bottles.

Because they live in a society with unreliable tap water, but would like to pretend they don’t, since they realize that tap water could be made dependable (as it is in many places), and by pushing for tap water to be seen as normally dependable, they can generate more complaints from people where it isn’t dependable, which, finally, should make tap water more dependable in the long run.

They do mention consumers "worry about the safety of tap water after the high-profile contamination in Flint", so I am guessing people are a bit unwilling to take someone's word on "perfectly potable water" without seeing the proof. Or rather, it's "perfectly potable" until oops, the past few years.

When I was in Stockholm I remember seeing some sort of artsy indicator of water/air quality that runs 24/7 right on the public boardwalk. We need something similar in every town - a constant feed of water quality and ppm measurements, perhaps with a bit of crowdsourcing thrown in, similar to what Wunderground does with weather.

> They do mention consumers "worry about the safety of tap water after the high-profile contamination in Flint", so I am guessing people are a bit unwilling to take someone's word on "perfectly potable water" without seeing the proof.

This. I only drink bottled water. I just have very hard times trusting water which has been flowing in pipes. It may be irrational, but we're talking about a substance we drink every day. It's tough to overcome irrational fears about it.

The water in your bottles comes from somewhere, and it's almost never the mountain springs that bottlers want you to believe. In many cases, it is from municipal water supplies (i.e. it flows through pipes).

Is there not also a health risk from consuming water that's been bottled in plastic?

No.

The bottled water is just somewhere else's tap water.

Poland Spring, owned by Nestlé now, may actually come from a spring and may actually not be municipal tap water. It depends on which plant it came from.

There is a plant not too far from here. It's too long to get into tonight, but quite a few people are unhappy with the deal that was made with Nestlé. Rumors abound about corruption, bribery, and dishonesty.

It's a small town so I'm not sure what will have made it into the newspapers, but the town is Kingfield, Maine. Some of the people are pretty unhappy.

You can get your water tested

> we're talking about a substance we drink every day

Water? I cook with it, but what I drink is generally milk.

As with many things it comes down to educating people, sadly this turns out to be quite challenging.

But the reason people believe bottled water is better for them is because of companies like Nestle which created and marketed that idea to consumers.

A lot of tap water is simply terrible. I've lived in a few places now in Chicago and the water hasn't been drinkable without running it through a Brita filter. First place I was in the water was white.

I find the chloride taste of tap water disgusting, that's why when in the US I drink bottled water. Same holds for soda drinks in restaurants etc. Always ask for bottles.

I don't think blaming the uninformed public for the actions of multi-billion dollar conglomerates with politicians in their pockets and multiple avenues of propaganda at their exposure is ever the correct answer.

You can blame someone for being stupid, but you can't blame them for being ignorant after soaking in loads of bullshit throughout their lives. Blame the ones spewing the bullshit.

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