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Message in the Bottle

Finally getting around to commenting on this old WSJ article. Think back 15 or 20 years and the idea of buying tap water in a bottle (except for sparkling water) would have seemed pretty ridiculous. But that's exactly what most people do these days. To put just how ridiculous that is in perspective, I did a few back-of-hand calculations based on the following paragraph from the article:


Coca-Cola Co., with a 36% share of the $106 billion-a-year U.S. nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverage business, says it plans to build a plant that will be able to recycle as many as two billion 20-ounce bottles a year. Atlanta-based Coke won't say exactly where the plant will be located or when it will open. The company already has invested $41 million to build recycling plants in Australia, Austria, Mexico, the Philippines and Switzerland. But the move reflects a wider push by Coke to boost the amount of recycled material in its U.S. bottles to at least 10%, up from just under 5% in 2006.
So, Coke was recycling 5% of it's U.S. bottles. And the new plant will be able to recycle as many as 2 Billion 20-ounce bottles a year. And that additional capacity would represent an additional 5% of its bottles. So, 10% = 4 billion bottles. And 100% = 40 billion bottles. And they have a 36% market share. So multiply that by roughly 3 and you get 120 billion 20-ounce plastic bottles. And that's just in the U.S. That number is pretty crazy. All of those aren't bottled water of course. A lot of that is soda. But here's the excerpt that reveals the market share of bottled water:
One big reason why beverage marketers are mounting a counterattack is that bottled water is widely seen as part of the answer to the soda sales slump. Bottled water has just a 17% U.S. market share, compared with 66% for sodas, according to Beverage Digest, a trade publication. But bottled-water volume rose 11% in the first half of 2007. Soda volume decreased 5.9%.

So bottled water accounts for 17% of that 120 billion bottles, or roughly a fifth which would be around 24 billion bottles. There are approximately 300 million Americans. So that's about 80 bottles per year per American (including babies). And the article further states that only 23% of PET bottles are actually recycled. So that means the average American drops about 60 water bottles into the trash (instead of the recycling bin) every year. Crazy.
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