Bottled Water

Bottled water has transformed from a niche product into the most‐consumed packaged beverage worldwide. This commodity is linked to broader struggles over human rights and social justice, the question of who owns nature, and the future of public goods. Bottled water's negative environmental externalities include high energy and carbon footprints and major plastic waste pollution caused by disposal of hundreds of billions of single‐serving plastic bottles. These dynamics have generated oppositional movements that are both contesting bottled water consumption and resisting the industry's extraction of groundwater. Recent scholarship emphasizes bottled water's impacts on public tap water and its relationship to social inequality. In the USA, declining federal investment has caused deterioration in public water infrastructure, which contributes to high‐profile crises of unsafe tap water, where bottled water makes a prominent appearance. The widespread shift from tap to bottled water also heightens existing racial/ethnic and class inequalities.