CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 84Water Governance and InfrastructureRisk Perception and ManagementWater Resource Management and Quality

A Battle against the Bottles: Building, Claiming, and Regaining Tap-Water Trustworthiness

Parag, Yael, Roberts, J. Timmons·2009·Society & Natural Resources
DOI 10.1080/08941920802017248
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The environmental impact of the rising consumption of bottled water is over 100 times higher than drinking tap water, so its rise has grave implications for the environment and society. This article argues that the increasing flight from drinking tap water is at least partly the result of the growing distrust of the state's ability to protect the health of its citizens. This distrust snowballs through several stages in the process by which policy is designed and carried out. Bottled water firms contribute subtly to this distrust and weakening of public policy responses. The article suggests that some institutional and procedural changes are needed to restore trust, such as proactive public involvement in the problem analysis procedures, increased transparency at the enforcement stage, better science communication, public display of trust in tap water by officials, and labelling on bottled water about its environmental impacts.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/08941920802017248

Cites

18 of 18 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The evolution of bottled water from health necessity to a lifestyle and cultural choice has environmental and social implications, as well as industrial and commercial ones.

    “The evolution of bottled water from health necessity (i.e., a way to ensure good water quality) to a lifestyle and cultural choice has environmental and social implications, as well as industrial and commercial ones [22-24].”

    From Bottled Water: An Evidence-Based Overview of Economic Viability, Environmental Impact, and Social Equity (2023) · cites this paper as [24]

  • A more critical view suggests that growing bottled water consumption should be understood in the context of variation in public tap water quality, municipal water coverage, public lack of trust in tap water, and industry efforts to position bottled water as a desirable healthy lifestyle choice and as superior to tap water.

    “However, a more critical view suggests that it should be understood in the context of the wide variation in the quality of public tap water, the extent of municipal water coverage, the public (lack of) trust in tap water in each country, and the industry's implicit and explicit efforts to position bottled water as a desirable healthy lifestyle choice and as superior to tap water [12,22-24,35].”

    From Bottled Water: An Evidence-Based Overview of Economic Viability, Environmental Impact, and Social Equity (2023) · cites this paper as [24]

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Parag, Y., & Roberts, J. T.
Affiliations
  • University of Oxford (GB)
  • William & Mary (US)
Corresponding author
Parag, Yael
ORCID
Venue
Society & Natural Resources
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2009-06-30
Volume
22
Issue
7
Pages
625-636
ISSN
  • 0894-1920 (ISSN-L)
  • 1521-0723
DOI
10.1080/08941920802017248
OpenAlex
W2031261008
Cited by
84
References
18
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 3
FWCI
14.61
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Society & Natural Resources (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Water Governance and Infrastructure
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Risk Perception and Management
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Water Science and Technology › Water Resource Management and Quality
Keywords
bottled water, tap water, public trust, distrust of government, public policy, bottled water industry, science communication, transparency, citizen participation, environmental labelling, water quality regulation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review