Best Magazine Writing: Bottled Water & BPA Articles

Following up on my "Best Magazine Writing: Esquire & Sports Illustrated"... which follows up on my "Stuff of Interest & Authors Enjoyed", I began looking at posts with BusinessWeek and Fast Company links and found some excellent writing from each magazine on both plastics and the bottled water industry.

Three different articles with three different angles... all raising red flags around bottled water and the plastic compound BPA.

From Dec 2007, Fast Company writer Charles Fishman wrote "Message in a Bottle" on the bottled water industry. This award winning article basically was an expose of many of the negative things about bottled water.

In July 2008, one of the earlier posts I did to this blog was titled Impact of Bottled Water on a Town and links to the BusinessWeek story "A Town Torn Apart by Nestlé." Not to get overly "up with small town, down with big corporation" here, but it's nettlesome when you have a company (Nestle for it's Arrowhead water brand) retaining a lawyer on behalf of a town (McCloud, CA) and then the company negotiating with the lawyer. Seems to raise just a few conflict of interest questions.

The first two blog posts and articles are around bottled water and one company that sells it, but the third is around a component that's in many of the bottles themselves. In Feb 2009 I did this blog post linking to the Fast Company feature "The Real Story Behind Bisphenol A." As the blog post and article (in of course much greater detail) covers, the compound BPA (or Bisphenol A) is a building block of many shatterproof plastics and can be found in products ranging from cell phones to drink cans and baby bottles.

The issue comes from the concerns around the product's potential to leech into water and impact the reproductive system... particularly given it's presence in products used by babies with highly undeveloped immune systems.

Three different pieces around three slightly different topics, but all linked together by excellent writing that raises some disconcerting questions about both bottled water and BPA.

Impact of Bottled Water on a Town

We've all heard about the environmental problems due to plastic waste and the fossil fuels associated with the transportation of bottled water, but the April 14, 2008 issue of BusinessWeek details the impact that bottled water plants can have on the communities that contain them.

Given that the story (which is featured on the magazine cover) is titled "A Town Torn Apart by Nestle", you'd be correct if you assumed that the overall message isn't a particularly favorable one towards the maker of Arrowhead bottled water. One interesting tidbit details how Nestle paid for the lawyers who represented the town in negotiations with... Nestle.

Additionally, a distinction is draw between two types of bottled water that can be purchased... that which is from a municipal source and then refined (Aquafina as an example) and that which comes directly from a source in nature (Arrowhead and Fiji as examples). The message conveyed is that the environmental impact of water from a municipal source is less than the alternative.