Bottled Water – A 4,000 Percent Markup Via Coke And Pepsi!

Written by Adam Shake

So how much more do you pay for a bottle of store bought tap water, than a bottle of you’re own tap water?  How about 4,000 times more. Yup, that a 4 followed by three 000’s.

And did you know that many of the water companies fill their bottles from Municipal Water Sources?  Tap Water!  Dasani and Aquafina are such companies, and we all know who owns them, right?  Coke and Pepsi! To create the plastic for a 12 ounce, single serve water bottle, it takes the equivalent of 4 bottles of water.  So for every bottle of water that you buy, you are really paying for 5 bottles of water.

trash swept off streets and into sewers, end up in creeks.

In addition, 80% of water bottles end up in the landfill instead of in the recycle bin, and some cities, like London, have even banned the sale of single serve water bottles.  Other cities around the United States have stopped buying bottled water to give to it’s government workers and road crews, asking them instead to buy re-usable water bottles.

So how is this effecting the environment?

My wife and I live in Virginia, outside of D.C. We live on what’s called the Potomac Watershed, near the Chesapeake Bay, which runs from Pennsylvania all the way south of us. The Potomac river is an integral part of what keeps this highly built up, traffic congested area of the country healthy. When it rains, all the trash on the streets wash down the sewers and straight into the local creeks which then flush into local small lakes. Just like a toilet. After a good rain, the few lakes in the area are covered in Styrofoam, trash and water bottles, and the only way to clean them is for volunteers to go out and clean them by hand.

My wife and I have done this for a few years running. It’s called the Chesapeake Watershed Cleanup. We

Dasani - Aqua Municipale

go down to our local small lake and are given huge industrial size trash bags, and are then assigned an area of the lake or creek to clean up. The last time we were out, we spent 8 hours picking trash up off the banks of the creek that empties into the lake.

Picture if you will, better yet, hold my hand while I lead you down to the waters edge and show you what it looks like. The air is crisp and the smell of fallen leaves under the tree’s reminds me of childhood. It’s September and I’m looking forward to fall. This is when we do the majority of our camping and hiking, as the summer’s edge has been dulled by the cool nights.

Walking through the woods, I don’t see the creek until I almost step off the small cliff that hangs 15 feet above it. “Why such a high bank on both sides?” I wonder. I find out later that the oil, gas, lawn fertilizer and other pollution that runs off the roadways into the sewers and into the creek, kill the small organisms that survive in the creek water, essentially sterilizing the healthy stream. It also kills all the surrounding vegetation and tree root systems, at the same time, loosening the soil. Over time, the dead creek cuts deeper and deeper into the earth. Trees fall over and into the water. Without living organisms and plant matter to slow the speed and spread of the water, the creek becomes a sluice. Like an evil waterside, furrowing deeper and deeper still into the land.

Standing on top of the bank, I look down to see all sorts of trash accumulated and swirling in the little eddies and floating in a polluted cocktail scum. “Christ” I think, “I don’t know if its healthy to get in that water.” I turn around to look at my wife, who has come more prepared than I in her long pants, long shirt, rubber gloves and boots. Laying in the dirt around her feet are a few water bottles and as she bends over to pick them up I look behind her, back in the direction we have come.

There is a fallen tree and against the tree are hundreds (let me repeat that.) Hundreds of water bottles. I’m confused. How did so many water bottles end up 15 feet into the woods, and not 20 feet down into the creek? Again, I learn later that when it rains, the water level of the creek rises not only the 20 feet to the top of the creek bank, but overflows and flows through the woods like a small river. Water bottles float of course and are trapped against and under the trees, resulting in this pollution tide.

Potomac Watershed Cleanup

We spend the next 8 hours, cleaning up one side of the creek, a quarter mile long. I had arrived excited to be making a difference. I left, disgusted with all of us. We picked up hundreds, if not a few thousand water bottles. We picked up every manner of McDonald wrap or cup. We ended up with over 10 bags and probably 200 lbs of trash. On the way out, I grabbed a car hood out of the creek. We picked up dozens of toy balls too. Apparently, people leave kids and dogs toys laying in their yards. These wash down the gutter and end up in the creek. Dozens of blue, red, and yellow balls. Even more tennis balls. But the majority of the trash was water and Gatorade bottles. That particular year we both came down with bad cases of poison Ivy.

Don’t get me wrong.  We don’t mind doing this kind of thing.  We’ve also gone to cemeteries and cleaned up broken beer bottles left laying around by homeless people and all the plastic bags that blow around and get stuck in the bushes and tree’s.  When we go hiking, we sometimes bring a trash bag and pick trash as we hike.  But I wish that we didn’t have to do so much of it.  I’ve got sweat equity involved in making our environment a better place, and part of me thinks that it give me the right to say “Did you know it takes 4 bottles of water to make the plastic for that water bottle?”, when I see someone with one in their hand.

Yup, that’s me. Trying to clean up Lake Accotink, one water bottle at a time.


As always, don”t forget to Alter the Eco and keep up the good fight,

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