How it all began
The market first saw bottled water back in the eighteenth century: in the 1760s Jackson's Spa, a company from Boston, offered "healing" water bottled in clear glass bottles.
However, the real popularity to such water came a century later. In the nineteenth century, people suffering from poor quality tap water and various infections on top of that (it's worth remembering at least the sensational case of typhoid Mary), with a rush met the next "novelty". Pre-purified and bottled water, which was much safer to drink than the same water but from the tap, was literally swept off the shelves.
Later ordinary water not enriched with minerals is out of the game: in the twentieth century people invented to chlorinate tap water which made it more suitable for drinking, and most people preferred not to spend money for something that flows from their taps at home almost for free. The only thing people actively bought was mineral water: they could not go to the springs to get it themselves.
Giants are getting into the game
The doctor Louis Perrier got actively involved in water production: In 1898 he opened a company that bottled "curative" water from the springs in Vereges (France) on an industrial scale. It is noteworthy that the company managed to get rich due to the so-called Veblen effect (demonstrative consumption of goods due to their high cost): the initial supplies were intended for expensive hotels and restaurants, and, having migrated later to stores, they retained a flavor of elite.
Popularity to ordinary bottled water came again in the nineties, when the producers already familiar to the consumer with "Pepsi" and "Cola" (PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, respectively) entered the market and legitimately won a part of it.
The cruel deception.
But is bottled water worth as much as it's being asked for? According to experts, tap water is about two thousand times cheaper than bottled water of the same volume. In addition, in some countries bottled water is even more expensive than milk and gasoline, which is completely absurd. The product of most brands on the market is ordinary tap water, passed through several filters.
We also know of very egregious cases. In 2019, American journalists were able to find in six popular U.S. brands of bottled water ... arsenic - and not just a hundredth of a percent, and in amounts dangerous to human health.
Scientists warn that water in which no impurities have been found can also be dangerous: if the container is made of plastic, the liquid is contaminated by its microparticles during storage, which is hardly a good thing. The use of poor-quality plastics for the production of containers can also affect the quality of water is not good.
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