Bottled-Water Habit Keeps Tight Grip on Mexicans

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MEXICO CITY — Drinking bottled water is one thing. But bathing one’s baby in it? In Mexico, the world’s largest per capita consumer of bottled water, anything goes.

David Montero drives three hours every week from his apartment in Iztapalapa, a crowded district on the eastern edge of this sprawling capital city, to the village where he was born to fill five five-gallon jugs with clean water to mix with the juices he sells from a roadside stand. Back at home, his wife, Cecilia Silva Reyes, buys as many as eight five-gallon jugs of water a week for drinking and cooking. As for the tap water the city supplies to their working-class housing complex, “it’s yellow,” Mr. Montero scoffed. “It has been like that forever.”...Read More