The battle over bottled water moves to YouTube

The battle over whether bottled water is a blight on the environment or an upstanding consumer choice has moved to YouTube, where the two sides are dueling it out via video.

It's no trivial issue. Americans drink 500 million bottles of water every week. (Put end to end, the containers would circle the globe five times.) Every year, the oil and energy used to make water bottles would fuel a million cars.

Is bottled water an unnecessary environmental abomination? (See The Story of Bottled Water, from the people who brought you the astoundingly successful viral video The Story of Stuff.) Or a healthy product, influenced not by advertising but by genuine consumer choice and convenience? (See The Real Story of Bottled Water, produced in claymation by the International Bottled Water Association.)

So far, the Story of Stuff Project is winning the war for hearts and minds. Its YouTube video has almost 800,000 views, compared to 1,751 for The Real Story of Bottled Water. Of course, a lot of those people watched those videos, pro and con, with a bottle of water handy for hydration. Judge for yourself. Here's The Story of Bottled Water:



And here's The Real Story of Bottled Water: