$10 a gallon versus 49 cents a year
By Anne Henderson
Argus observer
Sunday, February 24, 2008 5:35 AM PST
Ontario - Beware. Reading this article may change the way you live.
Americans consumed 28 billion bottles of water in 2006. It takes about 17 million barrels of oil to produce 28 billion plastic water bottles. That is enough oil to fuel 1 million cars for a year. Refining that oil into plastic injected 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere.
These statistics come from Eric Yaverbaum, the co-founder of Tappening, a water bottle company he started with friend and fellow investor Mark DiMassimo on Nov. 17, 2007.
The durable, hard-plastic bottles that the two invested in to sell over the course of a year to fund their environmental crusade to “brand tap water” sold out on their second day.
Yaverbaum, a successful businessman, owner of the company Ericho Communications, was spurred to start Tappening for a number of reasons. The first reason came from the constant pestering of his teenage daughter, who he said carried around a hard plastic Nalgene bottle.
“Every day she came home with her Nalgene bottle, and she lectured me about it… which meant, inevitably, I would change my behavior,” Yaverbaum joked.
The second reason which would eventually lead Yaverbaum and DiMassimo to found Tappening, was a documentary film he encountered called, “Garbage: The Revolution Begins at home.”
Directed by Andrew Nisker, the film follows an ordinary family through their lives for six weeks — except this ordinary family does something extraordinary — they keep their garbage for the entire time.
“I was pretty appalled at what I didn’t know happens to my garbage and the ways I could do better to ensure that all my refuse does not go into a landfill,” Yaverbaum said. “What really struck me was bottled water.”
Yaverbaum reported that around 20 percent of the bottles from liquid products Americans purchase are recycled every year. And, while Yaverbaum sees the necessity for the bottles that hold products such as Coke and juice, he does not think bottled water is necessary.
According to Yaverbaum, and indeed according to the Environmental Protection Agency, public tap water is as safe and clean as any bottled water.
Yaverbaum said that tap water is regulated by the EPA, and bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. If the quality standards for each are compared, those enforced by the EPA are more stringent than those of the FDA.
“If the bottled water does not cross state lines, it is not regulated by anyone,” Yaverbaum said.
So, though the bottled water companies are not trying to get out of testing and regulation, they try, for cost-effectiveness reasons, to keep the distance their water travels down by having many sources for their water leaves some of the bottled water American’s consume without any regulations. Bottled water can cost as much as $10 per gallon. This is more than three times the cost of a gallon of gasoline.
Why Americans are willing to pay through the nose for a product they can get nearly for free is lost on Yaverbaum.
“That’s the big question,” he said. “It only costs 49 cents to pay for the amount of tap water most people need to drink over the course of a year.”
Yaverbaum described bottled water as the “environmentally incorrect Humvee of beverages.”
He said the Tappening bottles are no different from other water bottles out there and that he does not see companies that produce similar products as competitors.
“Buy anybody’s [bottle], just don’t buy bottled water.”
Tappening’s success is a result of a number of factors said Yaverbaum. The first, perhaps, is the power of celebrity, with Hollywood A-listers such as Cameron Diaz and Scarlett Johansen sporting the bottles which read, “Think Global. Drink Local,” and “What’s Tappening?”
“We have been so successful because our bottles brand the person that is carrying them,” Yaverbaum explained.
Yaverbaum and DiMassimo understood that they needed to put all the same marketing punch behind tap water as is put behind the bottled water industry.
Yaverbaum said he observed that people were making a statement by carrying bottled water; some people only drink certain brands.
This behavior seems silly when viewed in light of a report stating 70 million dollars were spent cleaning over 4 billion water bottles out of waste streams in 2006. Yaverbaum asks people to get the facts and decide for themselves to go back to tap.
