Bottled-water industry sinking

After this summer's deluge of headlines about the environmental impact of plastic water bottles, Beverage Digest reports that retail sales of bottled water (excluding vending machines and Wal-Mart) grew only 9% this year compared with 16% in 2006.

Manufacturers are reducing the materials required for their bottles, which is known as light-weighting. In recent years, Coca-Cola has reduced its Dasani bottle weight 30%, to 16 grams. PepsiCo has reduced its Aquafina bottles nearly 40%, to 15 grams, and Nestlé Waters is introducing a 12.5 gram bottle this month. Its last model was 14.5 grams. Nestlé, which owns Deer Park, Ice Mountain and Polar Spring waters, among many others, has a lot at stake. It controls nearly US$4 billion of the US$5 billion grocery market for single-serving bottles, according to Information Resources Inc.

Nestlé spokeswoman Jane Lazgin said her company has been working on bottles made from renewable material for several years. Just getting the plastic bottles to 12.5 grams meant re-engineering the bottle so it could stand up, avoid leaks and sustain suction.

Earlier this month, Coca-Cola pledged US$60 million to build recycling plants. One of the plants, in Spartansburg, S.C., will be the world's largest bottle-to-bottle recycling plant, meaning new bottles are made directly from old ones. A big problem, said Coke spokeswoman Diana Garza, is that many consumers don't have curbside recycling. Neither Coke nor Pepsi is working on a nonplastic bottle at present.

According to water-filtration company Brita (owned by bleach giant Clorox), Americans discard 38 billion plastic water bottles a year, and it takes 1.5 billion barrels of oil to produce them. Brita, which, of course, competes with the bottled-water industry, approached Nalgene this summer for a co-branded campaign encouraging consumers to filter tap water at home. Participants pledge at FilterForGood.com to avoid plastic water bottles for a month, a week or a year. Nalgene is also selling a US$10 "Refill Not Landfill" bottle and donating US$4 to the Blue Planet Run Foundation.