Experts Tested Fiji Water Against Local Tap Water And Found Something That Might Surprise Many

Despite having access to hundreds of retail stores, millions of Cleveland residents prefer tap water rather than bottled water, reports say. It’s not that these people like to be too modest or minimalistic. The reason, instead, is that while the city’s tap water is pulled from Lake Erie’s clean water, the bottled water was found to be littered with zillions of plastic particles. In a documentary published by The Story of Stuff Project (@StoryofStuff) on 2010’s World Water Day, a woman shared how Cleveland’s tap water was found to be purer and more suited to drinking than the bottled water of a brand that advertises itself as the provider of Earth’s finest water: Fiji.

Fiji Water, famed for being one of the most popular bottled water brands, vouches for itself as the supplier of water that is “untouched by man because he had nothing to do with it,” as the narrator says in this YouTube ad. In 2006, the brand rolled out an ad campaign whose headline read, “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland,” according to the picture shared on X by Edward Builds (@showprogress). It turned out to be their “dumbest mistakes in history as the city of Cleveland didn’t like to be the butt of their jokes,” as the woman said in the video.

Offended by the headline, the city of Cleveland conducted some experimental tests to compare Fiji’s bottled water with Cleveland’s tap water. Not only did Fiji’s bottled water prove to be of lower quality, but it also lost taste tests against Cleveland’s tap water. Worse still was the fact that Fiji’s water cost thousands of times more than Cleveland’s easily accessible water. This was just one instance. The woman from The Story of Stuff Project explained that in the general case as well, “bottled water is less regulated than tap water.”

“Bottled water costs about 2000 times more than tap water. Can you imagine paying 2000 times the price of anything else? How about a $10,000 sandwich?” the woman said in the documentary. The answer lies in the seductive, environmental-themed advertising many brands use to cover up the reality of bottled water and to hide the enormous plastic wastage that goes on in the process. Fiji Water’s bottles, for instance, feature nature-related graphics like mountains, streams, beaches, and flowers. However, it’s not the mountains of water, but rather the mountains of plastic that are generated in this entire cycle.

Even after the bottles are used up, 80% of them end up getting jettisoned in the landfills, where they decay for thousands of years. Sometimes, they are burned in incinerators, where they sit releasing toxic gases, for a long, long time. Even when these bottles are set up for recycling, they end up polluting the environment. Yet, people remained, and maybe still are, ignorant of the 360-degree scenario. The culprit behind this: Manufactured Demand. When brands need to make profits, their goal is to sell more and more stuff. While earlier people thought that water was free, many bottled water companies created a “manufactured demand” by scaring people of the dangers of tap water. 

Pepsi’s Vice Chairman once publicly said that “The biggest enemy is tap water!” Indeed, in some places, the tap water might be oozing with contaminants depending on the environmental factors and local construction, but in the case of Fiji's bottled water versus Cleveland tap water, the tap water was the clear winner. The conclusion, which means, is to choose your water carefully, because sometimes, “Manufactured demand pushes what we don’t need and destroys what we need the most.”

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