Tap water is making a comeback.
With a day's worth of bottled water -- the recommended 64 ounces -- costing hundreds to thousands of dollars over a year depending on the brand, more people are opting to slurp water that comes straight from the faucet.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, June 19, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 30 words Type of Material: Correction
Bottled water: An article in Business on Wednesday about a slowdown in bottled-water sales misspelled the surname of the brand manager for the Pur water line, Bruce Lux, as Letz.
The lousy economy may be accomplishing what environmentalists have been trying to do for years -- wean people off the disposable plastic bottles of water that were sold as stylish, portable, healthier and safer than water from the tap.
Heather Kennedy, 33, an office administrator from Austin, Texas, said she used to drink a lot of bottled water but now tries to drink exclusively tap water.
"I feel that [bottled water] is a rip-off," she said in an e-mail. "It is not a better or healthier product than the water that comes out of my tap. It is absurd to pay so much extra for it."
Measured in 700-milliliter bottles of Poland Spring, a daily intake of water would cost $4.41, based on prices at a CVS drugstore in New York. Or $6.36 in 20-ounce bottles of Dasani. By half-liters of Evian, that'll be $6.76. Which adds up to thousands a year.
Even a 24-pack of half-liter bottles at Costco Wholesale Corp., a bargain at $6.97, would be consumed by one person in six days. That comes to more than $400 a year.
But water from the tap? A little more than 0.001 cent for a day's worth of water, based on averages from an American Water Works Assn. survey -- just about 50 cents a year.
U.S. consumers spent $16.8 billion on bottled water in 2007, according to the trade publication Beverage Digest. That's up 12% from the year before -- but it's the slowest growth rate since the early 1990s, editor John Sicher said.
Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc., the biggest bottler of Coca-Cola Co.'s Dasani, recently cut its outlook for the quarter, saying the weak North American economy is hurting sales of bottled water and soda -- especially the 20-ounce single-serving sizes that consumers had been buying at gas stations.
Flavored and "enhanced" waters such as vitamin drinks are also eating into plain bottled water's market share.
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A push for change
William Pecoriello, a beverage analyst at Morgan Stanley, said Americans' concern about the environment was also a factor, driven by campaigns against the use of oil in making and transporting the bottles, the waste they create and the notion of paying for what is essentially free.
