Have you had a bottle of water lately? Maybe you don’t like the taste of your tap water. Maybe you think bottled water is “pure”. I gave up my diet soda habit lately and wanted to find an alternative. Bottled water won’t be it. Read on…
- Bottled water costs hundreds or thousands of times more than tap water.
Tap water costs $0.002 per gallon while bottled water ranges from $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon. That’s more than twice the cost of a gallon of gas. In 2005, consumers spent $8.8 billion for almost 7.2 billion gallons of non-sparkling bottled water. - Most tap water is just as clean and safe as bottled water.
In fact, both regulation and enforcement of bottled water safety is weaker than of tap water safety. Federal, state, and local environmental agencies require rigorous testing of tap water safety. - The idea that all bottled water is pure is a marketing myth.
In some cases, beverage companies use misleading labels, including marketing bottled tap water as spring water. In fact, as much as 40 percent of bottled water is bottled tap water. - Plastic bottles can leach chemicals into the water.
DEHP is part of a chemical group called phthalate, which is used to produce plastic, including the ubiquitous disposable 20-ounce plastic water bottles made with polyethylene terephthalate (PET, also readily identified with the numeral 1 on the bottom of the bottle). These chemicals are potential human cancer agents that can leach from the plastic into the water, even under normal conditions. - The Food and Drug Administration regulates only the 30 to 40 percent of bottled water sold across state lines.
This means that up to 70 percent of all bottled water produced and sold within states is exempt from FDA regulation. Most food processing plants are not even inspected once a year and any safety testing of bottled water is performed by the companies themselves. - U.S. plastic bottle production requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil, enough to fuel 100,000 cars.
Worldwide bottling of water uses about 2.7 million tons of plastic each year. Each bottle requires nearly five times its volume in water to manufacture the plastic and may have caused the release of nickel, ethylene oxide, and benzene during the process. - About 86 percent of the empty plastic water bottles in the United States land in the garbage instead of being recycled.
That amounts to about two million tons of PET plastic bottles piling up in U.S. landfills each year. Single serve water bottles and other beverage containers, often used on the go, are recycled at a lower rate than containers typically used at home. Breaking down these plastics can take thousands of years, while their components seep into our water supplies.
Pepsi’s Aquafina brand, which is nothing more than purified tap water, registered $425.7 million in sales in 2005, followed by Coca-Cola’s Dasani bottled tap water with a sales tally of $346.1 million. Meanwhile, Nestlé’s Poland Spring brand, which does come from spring sources, rang up sales of $199.7 million.
Companies like Nestlé remove, bottle, and sell water that communities need. Opponents charge that the company, whose brand names include Deer Park, Poland Springs, Arrowhead, and Ice Mountain, is harming both the environment by depleting aquifers and other groundwater sources and the local economy by paying too little for the water it takes.
If you don’t like the taste of your tap water or think it’s contaminated, find out what’s in it and invest in a filtration system. Contact your local utility and request a copy of the Annual Water Quality Report. This report will give you information about any contaminant violations in your water system and help you figure out what type of filtration system is best for your home. The Environmental Protection Agency posts Local Drinking Water Information on its website. For more information, see Food and Water Watch.
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