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Paper short abstract

Scholars approach bottled water consumption from four analytical vantage points: political economy, semiotics and lifestyle, political ecology, and materiality-centered. Bottled water may be also approached as a bottled ecology, defined by complex biological, chemical, and legal processes.

Paper long abstract

Since the 2000s, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and STS scholars produced fascinating accounts of the steady rise of bottled water consumption in many countries across the globe. One potential analytic extension is to approach bottled water as a contained, bottled ecology. Despite low concentrations of dissolved organic matter and despite commercial slogans of “purity”, bottled waters are complex ecologies, containing indigenous bacteria characteristic of each spring source, minerals, microplastics, Oxygen18 isotopes, micro-planktonic organisms, and geological footprints. Bottled and packaged waters are vital ecologies, legally bound by expiration dates and standards, and subject to microbiopolitical interventions. The biochemical qualities of water are sometimes highly engineered, as bottlers operate intentional interventions, such as microbiopolitical efforts to remove bacteria in purified bottled water. At other times, bottlers are legally forced to refrain from intervening on water, as is the case with natural mineral bottled water, which is a regulated as a local product, whose alteration during bottling is legally prohibited, thus forcing bottlers to maintain the biochemical composition as it was at the source. Additionally, an emerging trend in the beverage industry, linked to the gut health fad, is the production of "prebiotic" and "probiotic" waters and sodas. Bottled ecologies thus take many forms that require scholars to think with more complex notions of “nature.” That requires scholars to pay increased analytic attention to how production, storage, frequent sipping, and diverse regulatory frameworks transform bottled waters, with what effects, and how scientific facts are translated into public understanding of water purity.