The Story of Bottled Water

I don't know whether it was done deliberately, but have you noticed that Evian (the bottled water brand) is Naive spelled backwards? It's as if the bottled water industry wanted to insult its own customer base, probably because it really would take a naive sort of person to get in a car and go buy at quite exuberant prices what is a publicly available resource already directly delivered to the convenience of your home, without you having to do anything other than turn the faucet.

Of course, people can't really be that naive. So, to pull off this hoax, marketers have had to create a fear campaign surrounding tap water. The consequences are twofold: huge profits for corporations who basically sell us bottled tap water, and an incredibly unsustainable environmental downward spiral... Annie Leonard (who previously told us The Story of Stuff) explains:



Comedian Lewis Black has also noticed part of this trend, and has some choice words to share on the subject:



And finally, here is Peter Gleick, author of Bottled and Sold, talking about the dark side of the bottled water industry:



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