The Growing Use of Bottled Water in U.S. Communities

Thursday - November 9 2023, 10:54 UTC - 1 year ago

The provision of bottled water in response to natural or human-made emergencies is a growing phenomenon in the U.S. The default response to these crises disproportionately affects lower-income communities that have an increased distrust of public tap water and has led to long-term reliance on bottled water, particularly in Flint, Michigan, where hundreds of millions of bottles have been consumed in a seven-year period.

A massive intrusion of salt water into the Mississippi River has left the tap water in several Louisiana communities unsafe to drink and could threaten the New Orleans metropolitan area. The most visible emergency response is the provision of bottled water, with authorities distributing huge quantities of single-serving plastic water bottles to residents.

These pallets of water are an increasingly familiar sight in the U.S. They have become the default response not only to natural disasters but to a series of human-made emergencies – from the crises of unsafe tap water in Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, to contaminated groundwater in towns in California’s Central Valley. What these places also have in common is that their residents are disproportionately low-income and nonwhite.

In such communities, public officials and charitable donors often present bottled water as a stopgap solution, to be used only until the immediate crisis is resolved. But in practice, bottled water often becomes a long-term substitute for compromised tap-water supplies.

As a sociologist, I study the social and environmental effects of the rapid growth of bottled-water consumption in the U.S. and beyond, and how it is linked to distrust of public tap water. In my new book, "Unbottled," one chapter examines how these dynamics played out in Flint. As its example shows, communities can end up relying on bottled water – often at great expense – for years after a crisis.

Seven years of bottled water .

In Flint, after the toxic lead and bacterial contamination of the city’s water system was revealed in 2015, residents demanded – and received – access to free bottled water as an emergency measure. Over the next seven years, they wound up consuming hundreds of millions of bottles.

While local activists and Michigan’s governor sought a federal disaster declaration that would have facilitated bulk tanker deliveries of safe water, that request was denied, and bottled water remained the sole alternative water source on offer until free distribution ended in December 2022.

Although most lead service lines in Flint have been replaced and officials claim the water is safe to drink, damaged pipes and appliances remain in some homes. Many residents continue to distrust their tap water, and many of them rely on purchased bottled water for their drinking, cooking and other needs.

They are not alone. Studies and opinion polls show that low-income, Black and Latino households distrust their tap water more – and consume more bottled water – than white and middle- or upper-income households. These differences have continued to widen since the Flint disaster.

This isn’t a coincidence. While the vast majority of tap water in the U.S. meets all safety standards – only 7% to 8% of U.S. water systems experience any health-related violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act in an average year – these problems disproportionately affect low-income communities, particularly those with high proportions of Black and Latino residents. Towns from Illinois to California, and schools in Newark, Baltimore and other cities, have been dependent on bottled water for years.