If I'm driving around your beautiful country, I didn't bring my own containers and I can't bring them back on the plane. Your own containers are much more expensive than the bottled water is. So no wonder tourists buy bottled water.
In my country (Iceland) everyone uses their own containers and nobody drinks bottled water but tourists. In fact you never even saw still bottled water in stores up until just a few years ago. The water that comes out of the tap is some of the most pristine stuff in the world, but you still see tourists loading several 2 liter bottles of the stuff into their shopping carts because they don't know any better..
It makes me sad to see the waste created in the environment due to ignorance. It's common practice to use re-usable drinking containers.. and you can do this while traveling as well. It's like bringing your own shopping bag, people didn't used to do this often, but now it's become more of a trend and it's good for the environment. Now we just need to get people to realize that it's perfectly fine to re-use the same drinking container.
It's not a hard concept, it's just laziness and apathy that drive these profits.
Yeah, I lived in Austria and travel across Europe fairly often, the only time I buy bottled water is in the airport or when I accidentally leave my refillable bottle of tap water at home. The quality of the tap water is equal to or better than the bottled water.
Not to mention that, if you believe the typical marketing bullshit, your bottle water is probably sourced from the Alps or some stream in the arse crack of New Zealand and then transported across the globe for however long that takes, until it finds its way to a store and then to your lips.
Brita filters (or any other filters/jugs) have their own environmental costs as well but you can chug through a decent amount of tap water before you need to replace one of those. Couldn't live without one of those in Barcelona (unless I wanted to down a glass full of limestone), and was much more useful than lugging back a few huge jugs of bottled water every few days.
Back in the UK, not a single reason to buy water in a bottle unless you're outside and in a pinch.
People don't buy bottled water for the bottles, otherwise they'd throw away the water, and keep the bottles. Instead they keep/use the water and throw away the bottles. The water is what they pay money for, you can get that for free at home.
Of course there's no reason to make people buy water on the other side of the checkpoint, but that's because it's generally ludicrous to have people buy water at all. In the USA, every airport I've been to has free water fountains both airside and landside. The rest of the world is way behind in this respect.
I've yet to step foot in an airport that didn't have water fountains, and won't let you take an empty reusable bottle through security. There's no need to buy bottled water.
Of course you can take your water bottles on the plane, you just can't take them with liquid in them. Just empty them and refill them.
When traveling there are faucets at every restaurant, gas station, campsite, or pretty much any place you can think of. It's even safe to drink from the streams out in the nature.
In speaking with tourists it's clear that the main reason they buy water (and in the quantities they do) is that they just don't know any better.
How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle.
$25'000 is more than you need in several lifetimes.
But then again, tab water here is excellent and also cool. So I don't see a reason why I should transport bottled water. It is much more convenient and cheaper.
It seems to be a very American thing to drink bottled water when there's perfectly fine water in the tap (unless you live in Flint, MI).
I buy bottled water maybe once a fortnight, if that. The only time I buy it is if I'm out and about and don't have a ready supply of water. I buy the cheapest water I can get, which I'm fairly sure is bottled in the city straight from municipal supply.
I find the concept of buying water like San Pellegrino to be so absurd. There's all this perfectly fine water to drink here, and you ship it from the other side of the world? It's the highest form of wastefulness.
My limited experience is in Southeast Asia and Mexico tourists used bottled water and natives do not, at the time I went ages ago it was the recommended behavior but the rivers in Southeast Asia had lots of what appeared to be single use containers, there was simply no larger cultural impetus to dispose of stuff properly. OTOH riding my bike around SF Bay Area there is always discarded fast food wrappers and packaging along paved roads, a few of us can’t be bothered even in one of wealthiest parts of USA.
Meanwhile, in the actual developed world, nobody buys bottled water because the tap water is perfectly indistinguishable from the bottled stuff, which the stores only keep for tourists.
This isn't true in my experience. I've witnessed plenty of people in wealthy US suburbs that stock bottled water at home and even stock up on vacation.
You have to hand it to the bottled water companies. They pulled off what must be one of the biggest cons in the world. First world countries with potable tap water buying it in bottles with inflated prices because of reasons.
The problem is there are usually no fountains around.
It's funny, last time I went to LAX I couldn't find a single place to refill our water bottle, meanwhile IAH in Houston has them everywhere.
Also, in a lot of countries bottled water is tested and is much better than the local drinking water. It's necessary when you go to Thailand or Mexico for example. It's also necessary for some places in the US.
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