This is an old story: bottled water is not good.
Not for human beings as they might contain cancer-causing chemical in the purification process, and in addition, the plastic will harm the environment as they are hardly biodegradable.
However, Coca-Cola launched a marketing campaign in 2010 in redesigning the bottle and named it as the “Plant Bottle”, 100%-recyclable plastic packaging made up of up to 30% plant-based materials. [1] It is not surprising that more and more companies focus on repositioning their products to have the environmental-friendly feature, and therefore the greenwashing phenomenon is occurring more frequently in the marketplace.
Greenwashing is defined as disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image by Oxford Dictionary.[2] And it is interesting in looking at the phrasing of ‘up to 30% plant-based materials’ in the bottle composition because Coca-Cola described it in a vague way.
Plastic water bottles can take 1,000 years to biodegrade. Nine out of 10 water bottles end up
as garbage or litter, and that means 30 million per day.-Message in a Bottle
The bottled water industry has boomed in the last few decades and it is surprisingly associated with healthy living. People, especially Americans, do not trust the tap water and thus they prefer filtered and processed water in a plastic bottle. [3]
This is an interesting video to end this post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XglitMx_eBw
[1] Coke’s Dasani Promoting New ‘Green’ Bottle. Marketing Daily. Apr 8, 2010.
[2] Greenwash definition. Oxford Dictionary.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/greenwash
[3] Message in a Bottle. Brian C. Howard
http://www.isisboston.com/assets/PDF-Files/Message-in-a-Bottle.pdf