Group: Share of Bottled Water From Municipal Supplies Up 50%

New analysis of industry data released by national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch found that almost half of all bottled water sold in U.S. retail outlets in PET plastic bottles now comes from municipal tap water supplies. “Bottling Our Cities’ Tap Water” shows that between 2000 and 2009 the share of retail-sold PET bottled water that is actually tap water grew from 32.7% to 47.8%.

The data also reveals that the volume of tap water bottled in PET and sold in retail outlets increased almost twice as fast as that of spring water over the same period. In 2000, 449.3 million gal of tap water were bottled, increasing 453% to 2.5 billion gal in 2009. Over that same time, the volume of spring water bottled grew 194% from 922.8 million gal to 2.7 billion gal.

“These are the numbers the bottled water industry doesn’t want you to see,” said Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter. “These figures reveal that more and more bottled water is basically the same product the flows from consumer taps, subsidized by taxpayer dollars--then poured into an environmentally destructive package, and sold for thousands of times its actual value.”

According to the group, the industry data attributes the increase in tap water in retail-sold PET bottled water to Nestle Pure Life’s switch from spring water to tap water in 2005. The company increased expenditures on advertising for Nestle Pure Life by 3,000% between 2004 and 2009, and sales of the brand were up by 18% in 2009.

While community resistance to spring water and groundwater extraction has increased in recent years, many municipalities have brokered deals with bottled water companies to sell off water supplies allocated for future growth or times of drought in exchange for the promise of jobs or increased tax revenues, according to Food & Water Watch. Separate analysis conducted by Food & Water Watch found that the typical bottled water plant employs only 24 people.