Bottled water ... packaging
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Multiple packaging Packaging used for water can have very different shapes and colours and are made of different materials. For a long time, bottled water were only available in glass, a very good but heavy material. At the end of the 1960s, bottlers started to use packaging made of PVC (poly vinyl chloride).
In the 1980s, a new kind of plastic started being used: PET (polyethylene terephtalate).
Plastic, either PVC or PET, is the most frequently used material to make bottles of water: about 70% of the bottles used for natural mineral water are made of plastic.
Organisation (WHO), in charge of elaborating international standards to ensure food safety. Roughly 1.5 million tons of plastic are used world-wide to make bottles of water.
Indeed, plastic bottles are more expensive than the liquid they contain. Their price can fluctuate according to oil prices. In Germany, though, water is almost exclusively bottled in returnable glass packaging. There is therefore a lesser need for disposable plastic. In addition, Germans prefer (and mostly produce) aerated waters. Even if special PET bottles can resist gas pressure, they tend to be more porous than glass.
In other countries, glass bottles are used mostly for the catering industry.
Still or aluminium cans are marginal in most countries; in Belgium, Switzerland and Hungary they account for respectively 1% and 0.4% of bottled water packaging. Cans are a practical packaging to sell through automatic distributors. They are mostly used for carbonated waters.
The biggest packaging for bottled water is a 5-gallon carboy (about 20 litres), sold in the USA mostly through home and office delivery. 28% of the bottled water drunk in the world is distributed through home or office carboy delivery services.
Packaging is an essential part of bottled water marketing strategies.
A product must have visibility to sell, its presentation refers to notions such as service, security, hygiene (Miquel, 1999). In some cases, such as Perrier, it is even possible to recognise the brand of the bottled water thanks to the shape and colour of its packaging.
Some brands have reshaped their bottles in order to make them look like the marketing message they are supposed to carry. Evian bottles, for instance, now figure high mountains not only on the labels but also on the plastic itself.
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