Bottled water is one of the greatest marketing scams of the modern age. Take PepsiCo’s Aquafina brand, for example. Just by including a picture of mountains on the label, we are led to believe that this water originates from a natural drinking source. It’s essentially the same tactic that is used by several companies who bottle and sell water to the masses, as well as by food manufacturers who wish us to believe their products are ‘natural.’
Pepsico recently admitted that Aquafina is really just tap water, so ask yourself, why do we pay 2,000x the price of tap for it?
Nestle’s Pure Life and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, the world’s largest corporate water brands, are also guilty of this kind of willful misdirection. Three years ago, Coca-Cola admitted that Dasani is just filtered tap water.
In 2007, Corporate Accountability International, based in Boston, pressured the U.S. manufacturer of Aquafina bottled water to make it clear that the drink is made with treated tap water. They said that PepsiCo was guilty of misleading marketing practices used to “turn water from a natural resource into a pricey consumer item.”
Although this effort began several years, activists are still pressuring the company to label all of their bottles with something that, truly, should be public knowledge.
“New labels will spell out “public water source,” acknowledging the bottled brand’s shared origin with tap water. Aquafina is then purified through a seven-step process, stripping it of minerals and other contents commonly found in municipal water supply.” (source)
So, it seems not all of the bottles were labelled, which is why RT news as well as Greenpeace have also joined in to contribute to the bad press for bottled water, and we are happy to do the same. It’s just another opportunity to provide the masses with the truth about bottled water.
