Buying bottled water: Should you feel guilty — or trendy?

In Tokyo and Paris, you can now spend $5 a glass on special beverages selected by a professional sommelier.

Nothing surprising there, except the beverages being served are different brands of bottled water — with various "flavors" supposedly matched to different foods.

Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as "concentrated water" — at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to ... water.

And from Tennessee, a company named BlingH2O — whose marketing imagery features a mostly nude model improbably balancing a bottle of water between her heel and her hip — is retailing its water at $40 for 750 milliliters, with special-edition bottles going for $480 — more than a million times the price of the liquid that comes from your tap.

The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap — and worth both the cost and the environmental guilt of buying it.

But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.

Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences are largely marketing inventions.

"Taste for water is as much an effort of imagination as it is an objective fact," said Richard Wilk, a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University who studies the phenomenon. "The labels have springs and waterfalls and mountains. The latest waters are from Antarctica and Iceland; there is glacier water and iceberg water and water that is a million years old and water from 3,000 feet down off Hawaii. All of these things promise an untouched nature far from human beings."

There is abundant irony in such marketing: Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people at virtually no cost — and it is people in precisely these countries who seem willing to pay premiums of 1,000 percent to 10,000 percent for bottled water.

As the wealthiest billion people on the planet increasingly turn to bottled water, moreover, the poorest billion have little or no access to clean water.

On its face, the bottled-water trade makes selling snow to Eskimos sound like a reasonable business proposition: Tons of carbon dioxide is emitted each year to produce and transport a product thousands of miles from Place A to Place B, when an identical product is already available in Place B in a form that is typically much cheaper, rigorously tested and sometimes safer. And afterward, millions of plastic bottles end up in landfills.

A considerable volume of the bottled water that Americans buy each year, moreover, is tap water. Popular brands such as Aquafina and Dasani are actually tap water that has been put through additional filtration and purification — techniques aimed at making water that is already clean ... clean.

An additional irony in buying water shipped thousands of miles from places such as Fiji is that large numbers of people who live in those places would give anything to have water of the quality of U.S. tap water.

Fiji Water ships its bottles from the South Pacific island nation to Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif.; Philadelphia; Miami; and Savannah, Ga., and then sends it by road to the rest of the United States. In 2007, it shipped the equivalent of 12 million cases of 12-liter bottles — about 200 million bottles in all, or about 1 percent of the U.S. market. The company's Web site says that its water is "untouched by man."

Thomas Mooney, senior vice president for sustainable growth at Fiji, said Fiji water is different from other brands because it has a different "mouthfeel" — a term being popularized by the bottled-water industry as it encourages water connoisseurship along the lines of wine connoisseurship.

Under pressure from environmental groups, however, many institutions and governments are starting to balk at such pitches.

Last week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution urging the jurisdictions of the mayors in its membership to limit bottled water to emergency situations, such as outbreaks of contamination, accidents or disasters, and to rely on tap water for everyday use.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has been particularly vocal on the issue, directing the city in March to stop buying bottled water. He estimated it could save taxpayers as much as $57,000 a year. While there is no bottled water now in City Hall, the order doesn't go into effect until January for other city facilities. Nickels also launched a campaign touting the quality of Seattle tap water.

Albuquerque, N.M., Mayor Martin Chavez, who helped spearhead the mayors' initiative, said it was triggered by a combination of cost and environmental concerns.

"It has a 1,000 to 10,000 percent markup over tap water," Chavez said of bottled water. "Most taxpayers would be outraged if we paid $1,000 for a pen when it is available for a dollar."

But Chavez said he also wants to combat the notion at the heart of the bottled-water industry's marketing efforts: "The subtext of the bottled-water industry is the suggestion that tap water is unsafe or unhealthy, or that bottled water is better or healthier."

"People who drank bottled water first drank it because it was chic," said Elizabeth Royte, author of "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It."

"But then it went from fashion to fear, and most of the time the fear of water is not well founded."

Material from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.