We Need to Put a Cap on Bottled Beverages

Bottled water may be the environmental scapegoat of the soft-drink industry.

I don't mean to let bottled water off the hook. It's absurd to pay $1 or more for 12-ounce bottles of stuff we can get from a kitchen sink for pennies per gallon, especially when the store-bought stuff often isn't any better than tap water.

It takes a lot of fuel to haul bottled spring water from far-off locales like Fiji, Iceland or Europe. And only about 15% of water bottles are recycled.

But other types of soft drinks are not much greener.

I had coffee recently with Jon Olafsson, chief executive of Icelandic Water Holdings, whose Icelandic Glacial water won its industry award this fall for most environmentally friendly water (an award I took a skeptical view of). He and other industry executives, like the CEO of Nestle, are feeling unfairly beat up on by cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, which are weaning citizens from their water bottles with public chastisement, taxes and a ban on bottled water in municipal offices, respectively. And then there are all the environmentalists who regularly slag on bottled water in blogs like LighterFootstep.

"In San Francisco, why not ban all canned and bottled drinks?" Olaffson asked me. "Why just water?"

He's got a point -- at least when it comes to recycling. In our grab-and-go culture, bottles of soda, iced tea, sports drinks and juices do their fair share of filling trash bins, garbage dumps and landfills.

Sodas still account for a full half of U.S. soft drink sales while bottled water has slightly more than a quarter of the market, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp.

Moreover, aside from a few small players like Fiji water and Icelandic Glacial (which is likely to become bigger soon after a recent investment from Anheuser-Busch(BUD Quote)) the biggest bottled water brands are owned by the industry gorillas who put a variety of soft drinks onto store shelves: Dasani by Coca-Cola(KO Quote), Aquafina by PepsiCo(PEP Quote), Perrier, Poland Spring, Deer Park and others by Nestle.

So why not hold them more accountable for recycling and reusing the plastic containers for all their drinks, rather than demonizing one in particular?

The extended producer responsibility movement calls for consumer-product companies to take responsibility for the lifecycle of the containers their goods come in. It makes sense, especially when those companies have spotty records when it comes to supporting efforts that would make their goods more eco-friendly.

The big beverage companies are finally claiming to have found the recycling religion, as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal story. Coca-Cola, for one, announced last fall that it wants its bottles be made of 100% recycle or reused material. But it didn't give a time frame for doing so or say how much recycled material it uses now.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi have long come under environmentalists' fire for not supporting recycling, in particular deposit programs. Even today, their Web sites notably don't talk much about them, focusing instead on community recycling , which doesn't cost them anything or actually return their bottles and cans to them.

As valuable as those other efforts are, deposits seem to be more effective at getting people to recycle.

Despite the prevalence of community and curbside programs in the U.S., the rate for soft-drink bottle recycling overall remains well below 50%.

This is partly because so many bottled beverages are bought or consumed away from home. Public spaces like airports, malls, train stations, offices, schools, parks, stadiums and concert venues often don't have recycling bins.