You Don't Need A Scented Water Bottle

I’m being bombarded with ads for a product that I can’t stand. While this brand promises a low-cost, sustainable solution to “transforming” your drinking experience, as a plastics expert I have some notes.

YouTubers and influencers left and right are accepting brand deals from Air Up, who sells a very special kind of water bottle. The premise of the product is that, instead of buying flavored water, you can turn regular water into “scented” tap water using plastic “scent pods” that provide the experience of flavor without actually adding anything into your water.

I would argue that throwing some cucumber slices or fresh fruit juice directly into your home tap water is vastly easier, allows for more variety, uses zero plastic, and doesn’t require a subscription service twice as expensive as Netflix…but what do I know??

I first heard about the Air Up bottle from a video by Internet Shaquille—the only respectable YouTuber—and I immediately thought, “ugh, what a waste of plastic!!” Maybe it’s the fact that I teach not one, but two, courses on plastic pollution, and another on green chemistry in general, so material waste is on my mind 24/7, no matter what semester we’re in. But upon learning that the scent pods only “work” with the slightly-angled Air Up bottle—you can’t just slap them on whatever bottle you have—and that 3 pods are only good for TEN DAYS, I thought that surely we’ve hit a new low as a society.

Before digging into this, I want to say that there are, indeed, some people who might really need this product. An entire module of my aforementioned plastics course is about eco-ableism, a symptom of which is neurodivergent/able-bodied people declaring that “surely THIS product doesn’t need to exist!!” and enacting bans without considering the needs of diverse people.