America's obsession with single serving water is creating ugly mountains of cheap plastic bottles and a public relations headache for a segment of the packaging industry struggling with the 3-headed hydra of escalating oil prices, rising environmental concerns, and health fears over a chemical compound called bisphenol-A. The glass industry, which a decade seemed ready to concede defeat in the war with plastics, has had recent successes in attracting business away from plastics and aluminium. Customers like grocery chain Safeway Stores are using glass for fast-expanding lines of organic food products and Pepsico & Coca-Cola are once again experimenting with glass bottles after largely abandoning the containers during the early 1990s. Added to this, higher in oil prices has seen production costs of plastics rise.
