To the extent that one may trust studies that do not present their methodology, this figure offers some interesting data (https://www.statista.com/chart/31772/leading-bottled-water-brands-by-global-market-share/). First, the largest producers add up to 41%, while the rest is a plethora of thousands of brands and producers across the globe. Do scholars know enough about them? Are they different from the brands owned by the big four actors - Nestle, Danone, Pepsi and Coca-Cola? Second, private, “discount” water bottlers who produce purified water for supermarkets (Costo in the US, Kaufland in Europe), retailers (Seven-Eleven), even organizers, sport businesses (such the Yankees) – rose significantly, representing altogether five percent of the total production.

Third, whereas 10-15 years ago all major companies were European and North American, the fourth largest company is Chinese, Tingyi, set up in 1991. China is simultaneously a top three exporter of bottled water at a global level, a major importer of “premium” bottled water such as San Pellegrino, and a population (“market”) targeted by bottled water brands from Europe to be “taught” to drink more bottled water.

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The poem discretely humors the hyperbolic and promissory marketing discourse of bottled water. Bottled water also functions as a rupture of everyday rhythm, and as a background upon which doubt is projected. Below you may find Kim Dower’s public reading of her poem in Bryant Park on July 29, 2025, as well as the poem.

Bottled Water, by Kim Dower

I go to the corner liquor store

for a bottle of water, middle

of a hectic day, must get out

of the office, stop making decisions,

quit obsessing does my blue skirt clash

with my hot pink flats; should I get

my mother a caregiver or just put her

in a home, and I pull open the glass

refrigerator door, am confronted

by brands—Arrowhead, Glitter Geyser,

Deer Park, spring, summer, winter water,

and clearly the bosses of bottled water:

Real Water and Smart Water—how different

will they taste? If I drink Smart Water

will I raise my IQ but be less authentic?

If I choose Real Water will I no longer

deny the truth, but will I attract confused,

needy people who’ll take advantage

of my realness by dumping their problems

on me, and will I be too stupid to help them

sort through their murky dilemmas?

I take no chances, buy them both,

sparkling smart, purified real, drain both bottles,

look around to see is anyone watching?

I’m now brilliantly hydrated.

Both real and smart my insides bubble

with compassion and intelligence

as I walk the streets with a new swagger,

knowing the world is mine.

Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2012 by Kim Dower, whose most recent book of poems is Slice of Moon, Red Hen Press, 2013. Poem reprinted from Barrow Street, Winter 2012/13, by permission of Kim Dower and the publisher.

Liviu Chelcea teaches at the University of Bucharest and is interested in inequalities, housing, and metabolic flows in cities. Holding a PhD in anthropology (2005) from the University of Michigan, he writes about postsocialism, de-industrialisation, housing restitution, and urban infrastructures in Bucharest. Since 2018, he has been studying the multiple ways drinking water is accessed and managed in New York City, including the domestic use of water filters (American Ethnologist) and water hospitality in restaurants (Current Anthropology).

Alin Stancu

Alin Stancu is Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility and Public Relations at the Department of Marketing from The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania. His main areas of research include: customer care, consumer experience, corporate responsibility and public relations. He is the co-founder of The International Conference on Social Responsibility, Ethics and Sustainable Business (www.csrconferences.org) and co-editor of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Governance, Leadership and Responsibility.

Marian Cercel

Marian Cercel is a Sales Director at a private company and an associate lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Marketing from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE) and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bucharest. He has written articles on consumer behavior in the private sphere of the family. His research interests include food consumption behaviors — including water consumption — as well as the ways in which marketing and society contribute to shaping these behaviors over time.

Adina Ionescu

Adina Ionescu is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Marketing within the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, under the supervision of Professor Alin Stancu, PhD. She also obtained a professional diploma in Public Relations from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in London. After completing four specialized study modules, Adina was awarded diplomas in Marketing and Sustainable Marketing by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

Adina’s professional background and the key positions she has held in several companies have given her exposure to various industries, including engineering and IT&C (Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent / Nokia, Thales), electrical and digital infrastructure (Schneider Electric, Legrand), automotive (Groupe Renault / Automobile Dacia), oil and gas (MOL Group), FMCG (Campofrio, Sigma Alimentos / Caroli Foods Group), and international trade (Samsung Corporation). She has also managed relations with central authorities and professional associations.

Furthermore, she has defined corporate social responsibility (CSR) platforms, developed long-term projects dedicated to various communities, actively engaged in volunteer-based initiatives, and strongly believes in supporting civil society.

Adina is passionate about promoting the concept of sustainable marketing, which emphasizes responsible consumption and the adoption of ESG (environmental-social-governance) principles by both companies and consumers over the medium and long term. She actively advocates for the application of sustainability principles at the societal level as a foundation for national well-being.

Oana Mogoș

Oana Mogoș is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, within the Faculty of Marketing. She teaches Public Relations and is actively involved in both academic and applied research. Her areas of interest include marketing, internal marketing, employer branding, and corporate social responsibility—topics that shape both her academic pursuits and practical insights.

Her doctoral research focuses on exploring how employer branding influences employee satisfaction in Romania, contributing to a better understanding of organizational dynamics and human resource strategies in the local context.

Ramona Năstase

Bogdan Iancu

Bogdan Iancu is a university lecturer in anthropology at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA) in Bucharest, within the Department of Sociology, where he teaches courses in ethnographic practice, visual anthropology, and material culture. He is also a researcher at the Romanian Peasant Museum. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Ethnology from the University of Perugia.

His research focuses on post-socialist transformations in both rural and urban contexts — including labor, housing, material culture, traditional ecological knowledge and practices — as well as political ecology and heritage policies. Over the past decade, he has conducted ethnographic research on the Sadova–Corabia irrigation system.

He is the author and editor of several academic volumes, including New Cultures. New Anthropologies, co-edited with Vintilă Mihăilescu and Monica Stroe (Humanitas, 2012); The Material Culture (Re)Turn in Anthropology: Promises and Dead-ends (Humanitas, 2013); Sezonierii: muncă și identități în mișcare [Seasonal Workers: Labor and Moving Identities], co-edited with Iuliana Dumitru (Pro Universitaria, 2024), as well as of articles such as In Search of Eligibility: Common Agricultural Policy and the Reconfiguration of Hay Meadows Management in the Romanian Highlands (with Monica Stroe), published in Martor (2016), and From Peasant Workers to Amenity Migrants. Socialist Heritage and the Future of Mountain Rurality in Romania (with Andrea Membretti), in the Journal of Alpine Research (2017).

His most recent publications include the article Out of one, many: Hydro-economic logics in a World Bank-financed irrigation project in Romania (with Monica Stroe), published in Eurasian Geography and Economics (2025), and the volume Windows of Change: Post-socialist Transformations in a Community of Carpenters in Bucharest (Pro Universitaria, 2025).

In this project we seek to capture the multiplicity of bottled water in as many contexts as possible, by gathering data on bottled water production, export, import, hospitality cultures, and regulatory aspects, as well as usage in a variety of contexts. The project aims to better understand the variation between countries of the Global North, but at the same time to provincialize the theories and explanations of the rise in consumption of bottled water in the Global South.

Moving between maximal and minimal scales the project seeks to go past ethnographic refusal for developing new ways of understanding bottled water. We believe that the study of water distribution technologies, including bottled water, might work best through the “careful ethnographic study of groups and the water they spend time with … [rather than assuming] there was a good, whole, even natural way of relating to water and now it has been commodified, privatized, and alienated” (Martha Kaplan 2011, 516–517). Acknowledging that BW are “things with which we are caught up … rather than phobic objects” (Hawkings, Potter and Kane 2015, xxiv) allows us open to new ethnographic objects, such as logistics, labor, resistance, material politics, standards, sensory politics , and new forms of environmental justice movements.

Our project seeks to understand the bottled water production and consumption in Global North and Global South countries. Sometimes water is stored in bottles, other times in sachets, cardboard boxes, aluminum cans, sizable hard plastic and other types of containers. We will also document the long distance trade in bottled water, a particularly energy-consuming form of bottled water consumption.

Our project will also delve into how bottled water consumption is shaped in four large cities from Italy (TBD), Romania (Bucharest), Serbia (Belgrade) and the US (New York) by the state of the infrastructure, commercial cultures, tourism, communication strategies of municipal/regional water companies, and bottled water histories. We hope to develop new typologies of bottled water brands/producers by outlining the mechanisms, logistics, and strategies used in city/urban/national/global retail.

The project began in July 2025 and will last until July 2028. We plan to organize in Romania or elsewhere in Europe a workshop on cultures of bottled water in order to create a space of conversation centered around emerging themes, findings, epistemologies and concepts able to help scholars understand a defining trend of the 21st century: bottled water.