https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=zZCVOBidrGdU.kSbQ7_87DK_o&usp=sharing

To wrap up, above is a link to a map that I’ve produced roughly outlining the travels required to produce S.Pellegrino water, distribute it, and dispose of it. Bottled water, a seemingly simple product, requires incredible amounts of man-power, fossil fuels, and raw materials to go from raw source material to finalized product on shelves. The variety of products is vast – ranging from bottled waters produced right here on American soil to some that are produced almost halfway across the world.

The various geographical impacts bottled water production, distribution and disposal have on the entire globe are stunning and, to be frank, almost outrageous. There were plenty of facts that surprised me –

Factory emissions statistics

Percentage of bottles actually recycled

The entire system of beverage production and distribution, in all its complexity.

– But the thing that really stuck out to me was the number of bottles per American thrown into landfills. We hear talk about how landfills are rapidly filling up and we’re running out of places to put all of our waste, but when you take the time to think about the impact that getting rid of bottled water would have on landfills it almost sounds like a no brainer. There are plenty of alternatives to bottled water and it seems silly that there hasn’t been a bigger push to get rid of bottled water yet.

I’m not trying to argue that it needs to happen, but it seems silly to be fighting for a right to continue purchasing something that is doing so much harm to the environment that is already in enough trouble. Our consumption and irresponsible disposal of bottled is almost like smoking cigarettes. To be more clear, cigarettes are something that a smoker could (not always) easily do without, that causes a smoker nothing but harm (physically an economically), and is only still available because we want the right to smoke to be available to us. Purchasing and consuming bottled water as Americans is something we could do without, that causes almost nothing but harm to the environment, and is still available to us because we want the right to be able to purchase and consume bottled water.

It is a drastic comparison, but I think the similarities ring true throughout.

sources: (used in map)

If you google “bottled water” and “waste” there are is a wide variety of information and sources to tell you just how destructive bottled water is. From organizations formed with the sole purpose of putting an end to bottled water to newspapers who are merely exploiting the scandal of the anti-plastic bottle movement and everything in between can be found by typing in those three words.

Despite all of the scare tactics and dramatization used by these sites to catch the eye, there are actually facts behind most (if not all) of what they’re saying. The first site I opened was www.banthebottle.net mostly because I had heard the slogan before and wanted to see a bit of the ridiculous hype they were creating on their site. I am by no means pro-bottled water, nor am I anti-bottled water. However, I am slightly biased due to my favoring of a greener water consumption solution. All of this being said, I think some of the sentimentalist tactics being used by organizations created for the cessation of bottled water seem absolutely ridiculous. Upon further inspection, all of their claims are backed up by fact. I took a look through their initial facts sheet and all of the facts found there are backed up by reputable sources. Facts like, “Last year, the average American used 167 disposable water bottles, but only recycled 38,” and, “Americans used about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year. However, the U.S.’s recycling rate for plastic is only 23 percent, which means 38 billion water bottles – more than $1 billion worth of plastic – are wasted each year” are backed up by an article written by Charles Fishman, a man well versed in writing about waste in America (“Bottled Water Facts”). Fishman’s publishing history includes books like The Big Thirst and The Wal-Mart Effect.

According to a National Geographic article titled “Why Tap Water is Better Than Bottled Water” it is stated that more than 80% of water bottles wind up on landfills. PET used to be the only type of recyclable plastic, which made bottled water an incredible threat to those in favor of keeping Mother Earth as green as possible. However, there are recycling programs in place today that make recycling all types of plastics not only possible, but viable (Howard).

The big concern when it comes to bottled water is that the percentage of those recycling is only about 20%. This is where the biggest geographical impact of bottled water comes from. Using the statistics gathered, and the average bottled water size (16.9oz), we can deduce that every American uses 233 disposable water bottles a year. Take into account the average that are recycled and we learn that about 186 of those bottles (per American) winds up in a landfill. The current US population is 318.9 million people (“Your Geography Selections”). That adds up to a yearly 59.3 billion plastic bottles in landfills across America. The number would no doubt be higher if the entire world were included in these calculations. The production (and irresponsible disposal) of that many water bottles has an enormous effect on the physical geography of the world. Not only do the bottles last multiple lifetime, but the space they take up disrupts the greater ecosystem of the areas where landfills are established. Also, the emissions from producing bottles in that quantity are playing havoc on the overall global temperature.

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I want to start this topic off with some statistics about bottled water consumption just so we have a general idea of how large an industry bottled water is.

According to the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) in conjunction with the Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC) the U.S. consumed 9.67 billion gallons of bottled water in 2012. The breakdown of that statistic is 30.8 gallons of bottled water consumed per citizen. Converted to a dollar amount, Americans spent $11.8 billion on bottled water in 2012 (“Bottled Water”). This makes it the fastest growing in absolute beverage sales in the U.S. And the numbers are shown to have only gone up from there.

The reason for this is primarily lifestyle changes. The portion of the population becoming health conscious is growing which means that when reaching for beverages on the go, instead of soda or juice, more and more people are grabbing bottled water. And advertisers are aware of this. Water is the “healthy, zero calorie, pure hydration” choice for people on the move. It’s convenient, it’s healthy, and it’s being marketed incredibly well.

What does this mean for geography? With a growing market come growing opportunities in the areas in which these companies are located. With more money being spent on bottled water, bottled water companies need to grow in order to keep up with demand. This means producing more bottled water, which often times means the building of new, bigger factories, to increase production. The building of these new factories effects the housing market (i.e. buyers and sellers of property, construction companies, etc.) as well as the amount of jobs in an area. With bigger facilities often comes the need for more workers.

The downside to this can be that people who cannot match these companies prices for property often face foreclosure and are forced to move away from the area. Also, companies tend to hire the cheapest legal labor possible and it can be difficult if not impossible to live off of solely the wages made at these jobs.

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In order to get their products out into the market, bottled water companies sell their water to vendors across the world. Lots of the separate brands we know of (like San Pellegrino, Perrier, Nestle, Poland Springs, etc.) are often owned by one umbrella company. In the case of our examples above, all are owned by Nestle Waters.

After being ordered by various companies in various quantities, the water is shipped to the desired location from the nearest Nestle Waters distributor. It will typically travel to its destination by commercial semi-truck depending on the vendor’s orientation to the distributor (“REGIONAL SPRING & SPARKLING WATER BRANDS”).

One possible social geographical impact of this that I can see is the ability for people to live in locations farther from water sources than before. With the help of the advancements of transportation industry, water can now be delivered anywhere for the right price. this means that it is possible for people to inhabit areas that it would be impossible to live in without a clean water supply.

As far as physical geography, the only impact I can see that transportation of bottled water has on the planet is its addition to global warming. Shipping bottles of water across the globe (often times based on preference of water type in that area) adds immensely to the amount of CO2 being poured into the air by vehicles of all types.

sources:

“REGIONAL SPRING & SPARKLING WATER BRANDS.” CStore. Web. 8 Dec. 2015.

This section is focused on the actual process of filtering, bottling, and quality assurance of the water that companies receive from sources. For this process I will focus on one company in order to go into more detail about the actual process and the geographical impacts that these processes have.

San Pellegrino’s bottling facility is set up in San Pellegrino Terme, Province of Bergamo, Italy. The plant is operational 24 hours a day and has more than 400 employees at its disposal (“Sanpellegrino Company & Water Quality Report”). Stopping here to talk into account the effect this has on the social geography of the Bergamo area, San Pellegrino Terme (the commune where the San Pellegrino production facility is located) has a population of 4,974 as of 1o Dec. 2010 (“San Pellegrino Terme). This means that, if all of San Pellegrino’s employees are located in this area, which it is likely they are, San Pellegrino employees at least eight percent of the total population of this area. This means that this company provides eight percent of the total economy to this area (if not more) at any given time.

After drawing its water from the source, San Pellegrino has a 9 step quality process in place to the safety of consumption of their beverage:

“1. Source Selection and Monitoring

2. Source Water Receiving and Monitoring

3. Water Storage and Monitorying

4. Carbonation

5. Bottling Control

6. Packaging Control

7. Clean-In-Place Sanitation Process

8. Plant Quality Control and HACCP Program [(Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point)]

9. Corporate Quality Assurance Program” (“Sanpellegrino Company & Water Quality Report”).

Throughout the process of the production a great amount of greenhouse gasses are emitted. However, San Pellegrino has been greatly reducing its environmental impact over the past nine years. A seven year observation, study, and policy placement of their own emissions was done by the company in order to reduce their impact. By the end of the project they reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 29%, avoiding the production of over 460,000 tonnes of CO2 over the seven year span (In A Bottle).

This being said, the emissions by water bottling companies do add greatly to the amount of CO2 being released into our solar system, which is affecting the weather of the planet globally.

San Pellegrino uses glass bottles as well as plastic. Their plastic bottles are made from PET, the most easily recycled plastic on the market (“S.Pellegrino Bottles: PET Range & Glass Range”). So San Pellegrino is going as far as it can go to make sure they add as little to landfills as possible, therefore, reducing its physical geographical impact as much as possible.

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After bottled water companies draw water from one of their various sources, it needs to be transported to bottling and purification facilities. An article that Joel Fineman writes for U.S. News discusses several sources that certain water bottling companies use and the types of transportation these companies use to get their water from source to bottle. U.S. News gives the low down on where seven major bottled water companies (Poland Spring, Evian, Zphyrhills, Fiji Water, Dasani, Perrier, and San Pelligrino) get their water from and by inference how they get it from the sources to their production facilities. I will review a few just to get an idea of the different types of water transportation in the industry.

Poland Springs is located in Hollis, Maine, draws its water from the Poland Spring just outside of Portland, Maine. Traveling through pipelines into water tank trailers, the water is then trucked an hour south to the Poland Spring’s bottling facility where it undergoes purification and quality control tests.

Evian has set up its bottling facility in Évian-Les-Bains, close enough to their water source to put it directly from their aquifer into bottles. This means that the only transport this water goes through is plumbing that Evian has built to tap the aquifer and then lead to their bottling facility.

Dasani has several bottling plants that are located across America (being a branch of the Coca-Cola Company). Dasani uses municipal water sources and a, quote, “state-of-the-art multiple barrier treatment system” before bottling their water. Like Evian, the only transportation Dasani uses is internal plumbing to pump water from their source to the factory. The difference being that instead of a natural spring source, Dasani is merely using the water utility supplied by the city the factory is located in.

San Pelligrino uses water that originates from three Italian springs located near the Dolomite Mountain range. They draw mineral water, as well as naturally occuring carbon dioxide, from the sources via pipeline (it can be inferred) and carbonate/bottle in their plant located in San Pelligrino Terme, Italy (Fineman).

These transportation methods all have their own, and very different effects on both physical and social geography. The processes that Poland Springs, Evian and San Pelligrino (and many others with processes like them) have probably the biggest physically geographical impact. The pipes that these companies put in the ground to draw from their various sources change the natural landscape of the sources. Also, drawing enough water from their sources to be profitable depletes the amount that would be available for the species that exist in the area. No matter how it is done, the naturally occurring eco-system and, in turn, the physical geography that would be shaped by it are changed by the presence of fabricated plumbing.

There are social geography consequences to all of these transportations, but in different ways. Companies like Dasani and Draw from public sources of water and therefore deplete sources that would be available to the public, not to mention the fact that a lot of the areas in which their factories are located are often drought ridden. Other socially geographical consequences are the resorts that change the traffic patterns of persons to the areas where springs and bottling facilities are located. Many of the artiesan brands of water as well as those drawing from aquifers that supply springs are the sites of tourist resorts. The bottling facilities add to, and promote the tourist economy and population pattern in these towns.

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Depending on what type of bottled water we are looking at, there are several places that bottled water can come from.

According to an article on PBS’s website titled “What’s in Your Bottle?” “About 25% of the bottled water sold in the United States comes from a municipal water source” (Mauleon).

Water drawn from municipal sources must be treated to a certain degree by bottling companies according to FDA guidelines, and most bottling companies like Aquafina and Dasani go beyond these guidelines in order to make their water taste the best and stand out.

There are other types of water as well: artesian water, mineral water, sparkling water, spring water, and well water. All of these different types of water are drawn up from an underground source, from various levels. The differences in these types of water are basically the level at which they’re drawn from and what is in the water, either naturally occurring or synthetically. Artesian water comes from an aquifer, or naturally occurring source of water, that lies beneath typical well aquifers. Mineral water has to contain at least 250 parts per million of total dissolved solids (TDS). These parts are naturally occurring in most mineral waters. Sparkling water has naturally dissolved CO2 in its composition, and this CO2 can be artificially added up to levels that would be present at the source. Spring water comes from a source underground that naturally flows to the surface and well water comes from a hole drilled into the ground to tap into an aquifer that lies above aquifers for artesian water.

The biggest geological effect of how these waters are acquired has to be where come from. After doing a small amount of research, I’ve found that a good portion of the water for products comes from places that are either in mild or desperate need of water. An article by Julia Lurie shows that a few of the most popular spring and municipal bottled water companies draw water from sources in the U.S. that are typical areas of severe drought.

Not only in the U.S. is water being drawn from sources that need it more, but water access is also being restricted globally from those who are in desperate need of it. An article by Daniel Jaffe and Soren Newman quotes Maude Barlow: “water from poor communities in the global South to sell to rich markets in the global North.” Jaffe and Newman go on to refute that a lot of that bottled water remains in the South. A reason this bottled water remains in the south is due to the lack of municipal water infrastructure and this seems to be a hinderance on the lives on the people in these globally South areas. Prices of bottled water fluctuate far more on bottled water than municipal water, and this turns the lives of people from these poorer communities into a guessing game when it comes to being able to rely on a (now) commodity that is so fundamental in their lives.

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