When I was young, bottled water wasn't sexy. It mostly came in giant glass bottles that you laboriously tipped upside down into a standing dispenser and then drank from tiny conical paper cups. I associate it in my mind with not very prosperous small businesses. Then Perrier came to upscale restaurants in the 1970s, but it was much joked about as a needless extravagance.
My vague impression is that the Gulf War of 1991 really boosted the idea of drinking water from plastic bottles among consumers. The U.S. military made a fetish out of keeping troops fully hydrated, so CNN’s coverage of the triumphant American military during those six weeks was like one giant product placement for plastic water bottles. U-S-A! Bott-led-Wa-ter! U-S-A!
An often overlooked downside to things like bottled water is that buying liquids in bulk almost requires that the shopper own a vehicle: water weighs a pint a pound and therefore it’s practically impossible for a mom to manhandle a family’s worth of bottled water home on foot or on bicycle. These days everybody talks about all the advantages of walkability and how much a family could save if they only had one car instead of two and so forth, but few have changed their shopping patterns to accommodate their talk. Bottled water can be the backbreaker.
In general, a week’s worth of groceries has gotten a lot heavier per person over the last 50 years. For example, in the 1960s, my mother bought Tang at the grocery store and mixed it up with tap water at home. In the 1970s she upgraded to frozen concentrated orange juice and added three parts tap water at home. In the 1980s-90s, she upgraded to a carton of orange juice. Quality improved with each upgrade, but heaviness went up too, and along with that dependence upon having a car for shopping trips.
Buying, say, three gallons of bottled water is of course more extreme than buying a half gallon of orange juice, since the taste differential is smaller and the consumption level is greater, but lots of people do it.
So, if you are going to buy things like bottled water, you probably need a car for shopping, and if you need a car for shopping, you might as well live in a car-oriented place, and thus who cares about walkability and all that.
So, the key to reducing Carbon Footprints and all that is going back to Tang-centric consumption. And that's not going to happen.