Bottled Water
Bottled water is ridiculous. People pay vast amounts of money for water which is generally of lower quality than tap water – especially if it comes in a throwaway plastic bottle and has been sitting there for more than a couple of months. Increasingly, high-end restaurants, especially in California, are abjuring bottled water in favor of their own on-site filtration systems. And in a sign of desperation, Evian, home of the world's worst website, has released something called the Palace bottle, complete with its own coaster, which apparently "brings a heightened level of luxury to fine dining occasions". With any luck, the writing is on the wall, and consumers will start appreciating bottled water for what it is: an utter waste of both carbon and money.
But what about places like China? Surely there, where tap water is known to be unsafe, one can justify the existence of bottle water? Actually, no. You know how Dasani and Aquafina are basically just rebranded tap water? Well, it turns out that in China, bottled water is literally rebranded tap water.
Up to half of the water used in water coolers across China's capital could be "fake", or not as pure as its manufacturers claim, state media said on Tuesday of the latest in a series of health scares...
Three years ago, a nationwide inspection on barrelled water found a 22 percent substandard rate. In the most serious case, 80 percent of barrelled water in the southern province of Jiangxi was reportedly not the real thing.
In much of the developing world, the rise of bottled water is invidious. The elites know that the tap water is dirty, so they start drinking bottled instead – and as a result, they have much less incentive to make the tap water clean. It's a bit like the crime rate in Mexico City or Johannesburg: if it gets so bad that the rich start hiring their own security guards and living behind razor wire, then at that point they've taken matters into their own hands and become less interested in working towards a broader societal solution to the crime problem.
So even though the Chinese elite are enraged by this news, in my eyes it's not all bad. In China, it seems, the only way to guarantee clean water for anybody is to guarantee clean water for everybody. And what's more, with any luck this news will keep demand for bottled water subdued. I'm hoping that by the time China becomes the world's dominant economic power, bottled water will be remembered as a 20th-Century curiosity, rather than a fact of life.
- Q
- Dec 2 2008 10:34PM EST
- Finance Salaries: A Reply
- Dec 2 2008 8:07PM EST
- The Failed Subprime Clampdown
- Dec 2 2008 4:29PM EST
- Blame Citigroup's woes on the Citi-Travelers Merger
- Dec 2 2008 2:30PM EST
- Greenberg's Chutzpah
- Dec 2 2008 12:26PM EST
- Super-Seniors: The Last Word
- Dec 2 2008 12:04PM EST
- Pay Bankers Much Less
- Dec 2 2008 10:58AM EST
- Great Moments in Politics, California Edition
- Dec 2 2008 10:35AM EST
- Super-Seniors: Your Questions Answered
- Dec 2 2008 9:52AM EST
- What's a Super-Senior Tranche?
- Dec 1 2008 9:25PM EST
- Extra Credit, Monday Edition
- Dec 1 2008 6:29PM EST
- Zimbabwe: When Even the Central Bank Can't Keep Up
- Dec 1 2008 5:07PM EST
- Genius
- Dec 1 2008 4:14PM EST
- Adventures in Shopping, Black Friday Edition
- Dec 1 2008 3:55PM EST
- Endowments Dump Private Equity Stakes
- Dec 1 2008 3:22PM EST
Categories
Links
- Email Felix Salmon
- Alphaville

- Marginal Revolution

- The Panelist

- FP Passport

- Overcoming Bias

- Andrew Leonard

- Barry Ritholtz

- Brad Setser

- Carbon Tax Center

- Calculated Risk

- Greg Mankiw

- Free Exchange

- Dean Baker

- Alexander Campbell

- Kash Mansori

- The Bayesian Heresy

- A Fistful of Euros

- John Quiggin

- Michael Mandel

- Lance Knobel

- Mark Thoma

- Dan Gross

- Curbed

- Streetsblog

- Chris Anderson

- Deal Journal

- MarketBeat

- DealBook

- DealBreaker

- Carl Bialik

- Michelle Leder

- Brad DeLong

- The Epicurean Dealmaker

- Naked Capitalism

- Ultimi Barbarorum

- Econospeak

- Fortune: Daily Briefing

- Financial Crookery










