Carry Frost is well prepared for hydration. A registered nurse and mother of two from Colorado, she estimates that her family has accumulated “upwards of 25 to 30” reusable flasks at home for keeping drinks cold: large and small, of various designs and colors, with and without straws. But last month, as she sat in the 90-degree heat at her son’s baseball tournament, she drank from a plastic water bottle she bought for $3 at a local grocery store.
“Rest,” she said with a laugh, trying to piece together why, once again, she wasn’t using one of her many drink containers. “I think we’re just a lazy community.”
Americans drink a lot of water, but they’re on the fence about how best to do it. More than $2 billion in reusable water bottles were sold in the United States in 2022, up from about $1.5 billion in 2020, according to Greg Williamson, president of CamelBak, which makes the reusable bottles.
Sales of single-serve bottled water have also been rising steadily, reaching 11.3 billion gallons in 2022, according to the latest data from the Beverage Marketing Association, which tracks beverage sales.
In other words, consumers spend billions of dollars a year on reusable bottles to stay hydrated and then buy bottled water anyway, even though tap water is still free.
“faucet?” said Jason Taylor of Georgia, whose son plays the same league baseball in Birmingham. “A tap? I haven’t drunk from a tap since I was 18.” He said he’d heard stories about contaminated water, like in Flint, Michigan, and didn’t trust hotel tap water, so he filled his reusable flask with ice from the hotel and poured in bottled water. above it. the ice of the hotel he trusted; Tap water there, not so much.
Beverage consumption in the fluid period. Americans are turning away from the empty calories of sugar but still hooked on the convenience of a plastic bottle chilled from the store’s corner refrigerator. So we stack the containers, both single-use and reusable, in kitchen cupboards and landfills alike.
in creating zero-waste systems, said Jessica Higgs, a sustainability consultant in Berkeley, Calif., where she recently completed her Ph.D. But, she added, people who fill their reusable bottles with water from a bottle have not fully embraced the environmental proposal.
“They’re not all the way in or not entirely convinced,” said Dr. Higgs. She noted that reusable water bottles require resources to make, so having too many isn’t good for the environment either. “You can find them in every army of goodwill and salvation. People overflow with them.”
Alaina Waldrop, in Birmingham, has about 20 water bottles, as precious to her as bags, she said: “You have a good water bottle and you get bored of it, or you get used to seeing it all the time, and you find a new one that’s nice or a new color or holds more water or It fits better in the cup holder.
Ms. Waldrop, 20, works at Dick’s Sporting Goods, about a mile from the Birmingham baseball fields. The store has multiple displays of reusable flasks, featuring major brands like Yeti and Hydro Flask. Stanley flasks ($45 each) were displayed with a tag: Limit four per customer. “They are very popular,” said Mrs. Waldrop. I bought one for my mom and one for my sister. We are all obsessed with the water bottle. We all have this obsession. I wish it made more sense but it isn’t.”
She tends to fill her bottles at home with filtered water but doesn’t trust taps on the go, so she buys single-serve bottles at the gas station or store and pours that water into the reusable container. “I drink all the plastic and then I throw the plastic away,” she said, laughing. Why not simply drink all the water from the plastic bottle you just bought? “It doesn’t stay cold for long,” she said.
In practice, there may be little difference in quality or safety between bottled water and tap water, said Ronnie Levin, an instructor and expert in American public drinking water at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “It’s often just a random tap filling up those water bottles,” Ms. Levine said. “Monitoring bottled water is somewhere between zero and not routine.”
When you put bottled water in the bottle, “you don’t necessarily get anything better, except now you’re polluting the environment.”
In the baking heat of baseball stadiums, a line formed at a snack shack that sold water for $3 and charged $2 for ice in a Styrofoam cup. Steps away was a refillable filtered water tap that some people used but it didn’t have a line. This is probably because the filtered faucet was free.
Water has become popular enough that it’s often the same as soda or more expensive, although it has less of the substance—in the form of sugar—to serve. At a few nearby stores, prices for water and soda were comparable; At Walgreens, bottles of Dr Pepper and other soft drinks sold at $4 for two, as did bottles of Dasani and Aquafina water.
Bottled water remains much less expensive if it’s purchased in bulk, at Costco, for example, or the supermarket, said Michael Bellas, chairman and CEO of the beverage marketing company. He noted that prices for single-serve bottles rise sharply when the retailer has a thirsty crowd on the go.
“Airports swallow you,” said Mr. Bellas.
At the Hudson store at Birmingham Airport, 20-ounce bottles of Dasani water and Smartwater (both owned by The Coca-Cola Company) cost $4.29 with tax, while all 20-ounce soft drinks (Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, and Sprite) cost $4.09. dollar.
“Everyone should moisturize, and people think it makes their skin look beautiful,” said Kim Shoemaker, a Hudson employee. “No sugar, no chemicals, no additives.” Ms. Shoemaker, 60, said she bought bottled water at Costco and kept single-serve bottles in every room of her house, but she also owned several reusable bottles. “Oh, my God, maybe about six,” she said. “I don’t use them. I don’t know why.”
Just outside the Hudson store there was a water dispenser for reusable containers, the water is filtered and free and mostly unused.
Out at the baseball fields, Ms. Frost, who traveled from Colorado to attend the tournament, said she has family members who don’t understand why someone would spend on a reusable water container and single-serve water bottles and not just fill a glass on tap.
I offered her “Ask my husband.” “He thinks it’s the dumbest thing in the world.”
to which her husband, Spencer Frost, gruffly added: “Just drink from the hose.”