Annie Leonard: The story of bottled water

In her, frank and animated fashion Annie Leonard exposes environmentally threatening insights into a product that considerably exploits resources for such nominal outcomes. Industrial design has been able to created this wasteful industry, hence it should be used as a tool to correctly influence societal attitudes and behaviours to alleviate the issues associated with bottled water.

Reuse of bottles could just as easily take place, highlighted with the failure of plastic juice bottles and their market venture with non-removable lids, demonstrating a innately human motivation for reuse. Unfortunately bottled water has addressed core convenience issues in society without thought of consequences, further underlining a need for provisions of practical alternatives.

In understanding the roots of why consumers purchase such a nominal product for more than a nominal price, we can see that a lot of marketing and advertising has displaced more than it's share of energy in creating demand for bottled water.

By realistically approaching this issue with considered design solutions, maybe there will not have to be a cash grab from well established manufacturers, and hence, less backlash to obviously more environmentally friendly alternatives.

We can easily identify bottled water as an extremely wasteful use of resources, but it is still fills half an aisle retail stores. There surely is a better way.