It all started with water kiosks. In 2013, Manny Teodoro, a public-policy researcher who had just joined the faculty at Texas A&M University in College Station, had never seen a freestanding, blue-roofed water vending station before. He was surprised by how many of them there were — littered in parking lots across Texas — and genuinely puzzled as to why people were lining up to purchase water from them, when they could be getting their drinking water much more inexpensively from the taps in their homes.
About a week or so later, as the question continued to eat at his mind, a presentation from a geographer colleague gave him part of the answer.
“These are used by communities where water systems either don’t exist or there’s poor-quality, unreliable service,” says Teodoro, now a professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs. “And it made sense to me that this was a commercial alternative when there are public service failures. But what didn’t make sense to me is why these things were all over Houston, Dallas, Denver and Los Angeles. These are cities that have excellent, world-class drinking water utilities.”
Teodoro asked his graduate student at the time, Samantha Zuhlke, to map water kiosks across the country, and they discovered that most of them were located in poor, non-white neighborhoods. A few months later, the two attended a presentation by David Switzer, a former Teodoro graduate student, who was researching public trust in government and drinking water behavior.
“He found that people who trusted government were more likely to drink tap water,” says Teodoro. “People who don’t trust government were more likely to drink bottled water. Trust in government is linked to the quality and reliability of basic services.”
People who don’t trust government were more likely to drink bottled water. Trust in government is linked to the quality and reliability of basic services.
Those connections spurred Teodoro, Zuhlke and Switzer to write The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government, a book that examines the impact of the public’s growing skepticism of public water — and how the bottled water industry is making millions of dollars from it.
While most Americans have safe tap water — public water utilities are a highly regulated service — the rare instances of extreme failure distort people’s perceptions of public water and foment even deeper distrust. Recall the 2014 water crisis in Flint, Michigan, that exposed thousands of residents to lead or the Jackson, Mississippi, crisis in 2022 that saw flooding shut down the city’s water treatment system.
What interests Teodoro is the vector of that distrust. It’s not geography — it’s social identity. For example, communities in poor and non-white areas across the country began using bottled water in the wake of the Flint water crisis.
“Somebody in another part of the country, if they can relate at a social and socioeconomic level with the people who are victims of that crisis, they’re going to say, ‘Look, those institutions failed people like me somewhere else, so they’re likely going to fail me here,’” Teodoro says. “Failure anywhere drives distrust everywhere.”
In the United States, a gallon of public tap water costs about a penny — maybe two if the community includes sewerage fees. A gallon of kiosk water costs about 35 cents, and an inexpensive bottle of water costs the equivalent of around $2 per gallon. And yet, as Teodoro saw in Houston, the poorest communities are routinely paying the higher cost.
The commercial water industry is clearly profiting from the distrust and has plenty of incentive to stoke it. In 2023, U.S. sales of bottled water surpassed $40 billion, equal to almost half of the revenue generated by public water utilities nationwide. Commercial water companies have often targeted their advertising campaigns at communities of color.
“It’s just such a cynical appeal to fear,” says Teodoro.
Losing the public’s trust in tap water took decades; restoring it is likely to take just as long. Placing the bottled water industry on the same regulatory level as tap water could be a good place to start, says Teodoro. A few years ago, California introduced legislation requiring public water utilities to track and report microplastic levels in water. There is no such requirement for the bottled water industry, where the water is literally delivered in a container made of microplastics.
There’s also an environmental impact at play. The carbon footprints of the two types of water are, unsurprisingly, very different.
“Tap water is very efficient in its delivery. Think about everything that’s involved in delivering a bottle of water to a consumer,” he says. “There’s so much energy expended in the creation of the bottle, the transmitting and filling of the bottle, and transporting the bottle to and from different retailers. It’s horrific.”
Ongoing distrust in public water also factors into political elections and voting habits. Teodoro and his co-authors found that bottled water consumers are less likely to participate in politics than tap water consumers.
“Bottled water consumers have decided that they just don’t trust government generally,” says Teodoro. “If I believe the government is incompetent and/or evil, there’s no reason for me to participate. It’s a fundamental distrust of democracy.”
Teodoro recently paired with a company called Sequential Potential Comics to transfer the research in The Profits of Distrust into a comic book — a move Teodoro is hoping will bring the questions he and his colleagues are raising into focus and to an even broader audience.
“Ultimately, water has to be excellent, equitable and open,” he says. “It’s got to be good for everyone everywhere.”
