Bottled water is one of the most popular beverages in the world and the industry has been making the most of it since the millennium, the world has made significant progress towards the goal of safe water for all. In 2020, 74 percent of humanity had access to safe water. That’s 10 percent more than two decades ago. But this still leaves two billion people without access to safe drinking water.
Meanwhile, bottled water corporations exploit surface water and aquifers — usually at very low cost — and sell it for 150 to 1,000 times more than the same unit of municipal tap water. The price is often justified by offering the product as a safe alternative to tap water. But bottled water is not immune to all contamination, given that it rarely faces the strict public health and environmental regulations that public utility tap water does.
Our recently published study, which studied 109 countries, concluded that the highly profitable and fast-growing bottled water industry is masking the failure of public systems to provide reliable drinking water for all.
Industry can slow progress on safe water projects by distracting development efforts and redirecting attention to less reliable, less cost-effective alternatives, mostly in low- and middle-income countries.
The rapidly growing bottled water industry also impacts the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in many ways.
The latest United Nations University report revealed that annual sales of the global bottled water market are expected to double to US$500 billion globally this decade. This can increase pressure on water-depleted areas while contributing to plastic pollution on land and oceans.
Growing faster than any other global food segment, the bottled water market is the largest in the Global South, with the Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin American, and Caribbean regions accounting for 60 percent of all sales.
But neither region is on track to achieve universal access to safe water services, one of the SDG 2030 targets. Indeed, the industry’s biggest impact appears to be the potential to stall progress on the nation’s goals to provide its residents with equitable access to affordable drinking water.
In the Global North, bottled water is often considered healthier and tastier than tap water. Therefore, it is better a luxury than a necessity. Meanwhile, in the Global South, it is the lack or absence of reliable public water supply and water management infrastructure that drives the bottled water market.
Therefore, in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the Asia Pacific region, the growing use of bottled water can be seen as a proxy indicator of decades of government failure to deliver on the promise of safe public water systems.
This widens the global disparity between billions of people who lack access to reliable water services and others who enjoy water as a luxury.
In 2016, the annual financing needed to achieve a safe drinking water supply around the world was estimated to cost US$114 billion, less than half of the current annual global bottled water sales of about US$270 billion.
Last year, the World Health Organization estimated that the current rate of progress would need to quadruple to meet the 2030 SDG targets. However, this is a huge challenge given the competing financial priorities and business-as-usual attitudes prevalent in the water sector.
As the bottled water market continues to grow, strengthening laws governing the industry and its water quality standards is more important than ever. Such laws can affect bottled water quality control, groundwater exploitation, land use, plastic waste management, carbon emissions, finance, and transparency obligations, to name a few.
Our report argues that, with global progress towards this goal so far off-track, the expansion of the bottled water market largely works against progress, or at least slows it down, adversely affecting investment and long-term public water infrastructure.
Some high-level initiatives such as the Global Investors Alliance for Sustainable Development aim to increase financing for the SDGs, including water-related ones.
Such initiatives allow the bottled water sector to become an active player in this process and help accelerate progress towards reliable water supplies, particularly in the Global South.
Naresh Madhu
