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from Natural Life Magazine, March/April 2007
Ask Natural Life:
Bottled
Water or Tap Water?
by Wendy
Priesnitz
Q:
We’ve all heard about the necessity of drinking eight glasses of water a day.
Which is better – from both health and environment perspectives – tap water or
bottled water?
A: In a word: tap water. First the
health perspective. A study conducted in 2001 for The World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF) confirmed the widespread belief that consumers associate bottled water
with social status and healthy living. However, that association is largely a
result of good marketing by the bottled water companies (which include Nestlé,
Coca-Cola, Pepsi and others.) The global consumption of bottled water reached
154 billion liters (41 billion gallons) in 2004, up 57 percent from the 98
billion liters consumed five years earlier. But there is little evidence that –
except in cases of disasters that create tainted water emergencies – bottled
water is safer or healthier than tap water.
In fact, consumer groups have long warned
about a range of microorganisms and chemicals that have been found in bottled
water. In a four-year scientific study, the Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC) tested more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of bottled water. In a 1999
report “Bottled Water, Pure Drink or Pure Hype?” the group concluded, “Although
most bottled water tested was of good quality, some brands’ quality was spotty.”
The report also notes that “while much tap water is indeed risky, having
compared available data, we conclude that there is no assurance that bottled
water is any safer than tap water.” In fact, a third of the tested brands were
found to contain contaminants such as arsenic and carcinogenic compounds in at
least some samples at levels exceeding state or industry standards.
Scientists at the University of Geneva arrived at the same
conclusion when they tested bottled and top water for the 2001 WWF study. They
found that, in 50 percent of the cases they studied, the only difference between
tap and bottled water was that the latter contained added minerals and salts,
“which do not actually mean the water is healthier.” In 1997, the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that bottled water does not have
greater nutritional value than tap water. The regulations in North America
governing bottled water tend to be as spotty as the water’s quality, although
activists are pushing politicians to tighten up the rules, which they say are
not as stringent as those for municipal water supplies.
In Canada, Health Canada determines the classifications of
bottled water under its Food and Drugs Act. If bottled water is labeled as
spring or mineral water, it must come from an underground source rather than a
public water supply. And mineral water is the same as spring water except that
it contains a larger amount of dissolved mineral salts. Under the regulations,
chemicals cannot be used to change the composition of mineral and spring waters.
However, carbon dioxide and ozone may be added to protect the freshness. In
addition, the source of the spring or mineral water must be identified. If
bottled water is not labeled as spring or mineral water, it can come from any
source, including a well or a municipal water supply, and be treated to make it
fit for human consumption.
Bottled water that is not from a spring may be altered before it
is presented for sale in Canada. It can be treated in different ways including
carbonation, ozonation, ultraviolet radiation or filtration to remove harmful
bacteria. It may be distilled or deionized to remove the minerals. The
regulations require that these treatments be identified as such on the label.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency periodically samples and
analyzes imported and domestic bottled waters, focusing primarily on testing for
bacterial contamination.
In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is
responsible for bottled water safety, but its rules completely exempt waters
that are packaged and sold within the same state, which account for between 60
and 70 percent of all bottled water sold in the country. The FDA also exempts
carbonated water and seltzer, and fewer than half of the states require
carbonated waters to meet their own bottled water standards. FDA rules allow
bottlers to call their product “spring water” even though it may be brought to
the surface using a pumped well, and it may be treated with chemicals. But the
actual source of water is not always made clear – some bottled water marketing
is misleading, implying the water comes from pristine sources when it does not.
According to the NRDC study, “Even when bottled waters are
covered by FDA’s specific bottled water standards, those rules are weaker in
many ways than EPA rules that apply to big city tap water.” For instance, city
tap water can have no confirmed E.coli or fecal coliform bacteria, but FDA
bottled water rules include no such prohibition.
City tap water must also meet standards for certain important
toxic or cancer-causing chemicals, such as phthalate, a chemical that can leach
from plastic, including some water bottles.
In spite of all the testing, municipal water supplies are far
from pristine, as the NRDC has found. It analyzed data compiled by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency on arsenic in drinking water in 25 states. And
its most conservative estimates indicated that more than 34 million Americans
drink tap water supplied by systems containing average levels of arsenic that
pose unacceptable cancer risks. Arsenic is a byproduct of industrial processes
like copper smelting, mining and coal burning, and is used in agriculture. Some
arsenic contamination results from leaching from old waste dumps, mines or
tailings, or from past use of arsenic-containing pesticides.
But switching to bottled water is no way to avoid arsenic –
NRDC’s study found arsenic there too. Other toxic chemicals that appear in water
are added by municipal water treatment facilities. They include fluoride and
chlorine, both of which are controversial. Fluoride is linked with arthritis,
hip fractures, cancer and other diseases, and even premature skin wrinkling.” It
has been banned or discontinued in many European countries. Chlorinated water
has been linked to increased risks of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages and
stillbirths. It mixes readily with organic matter in water to form hundreds of
chemical byproducts, many of which have never been studied.
Some municipalities are using newer technologies, such as
membrane filtration, ultraviolet irradiation and ozone disinfection in an
attempt to improve their water supplies.
Since much of the bottled water for sale comes from municipal
taps (40 percent in the U.S., according to the NRDC), consumers can presume that
it at least meets those standards…which begs the question: Why buy water that
you could get from your kitchen faucet? That also brings us to the environmental
perspective.
The Earth Policy Institute has estimated that bottled water is
10,000 times more environmentally damaging than tap water. First of all, there
is the pollution created by the manufacture of the plastic bottles. According to
the WWF’s 2001 report Bottled Water: Understanding a Social Phenomenon, roughly
1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of
water each year. Most of the bottles are made of the oil-derived polyethylene
terephthalate, which is known as PET. While PET is less toxic than many
plastics, the Berkeley Ecology Center says that manufacturing PET generates more
than 100 times the toxic emissions – in the form of nickel, ethylbenzene,
ethylene oxide and benzene – compared to making the same amount of glass.
In addition, the energy required to manufacture and transport
the bottles to market severely depletes our supplies of fossil fuels and adds to
greenhouse gas emissions. Tap water, on the other hand, is delivered by a mostly
pre-existing infrastructure of underground pipes and plumbing.
The post-market waste produced by discarded water bottles
exacerbates the environmental problem. Even though they are accepted by most
recycling programs, many plastic water bottles end up in landfills. A 2003 study
by the California Department of Conservation found that more than one billion of
them are tossed into the trash in California each year. A biodegradable
corn-based water bottle is on sale in the UK and some of the large bottlers
claim to be testing their own versions. But they are no substitute for not
buying the packaging in the first place.
As if this weren’t enough, there’s another environmental issue.
A variety of groups are fighting the expanding bottled water industry on the
basis of threats to local wells, streams and wetlands. Bottling companies can
pump up to 500 gallons per minute, or even more, out of each well, and many
wells run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There is a growing concern that
taking too much water can reduce or deplete groundwater reserves and reduce the
flow of streams and lakes, causing stress on ecosystems. Although groundwater
systems can be recharged, it’s not clear how much water can be taken without
causing water tables to drop and streams and rivers to dry up.
“Our attitudes towards tap water are being shaped by the
pollution choking the rivers and streams which should be veins of life,” says
Richard Holland, Director of WWF’s Living Waters Campaign. “We must clean up and
properly protect these waters at source, and not just at the treatment works, so
that we can all rest easy in drinking from the tap.”
Meanwhile, how do we get those eight glasses of water a day,
some of it while we’re on the go?
Bottling your own seems to be the answer. Point-of-use water
treatment, with a quality in-home water filtration system, seems to be the most
economical and environmentally sensible way to get the healthiest water.
The best solution is a reverse osmosis water filter, which will
eliminate or substantially reduce a wide variety of contaminants, including much
of the fluoride and chlorine. It is also the system used by many of the
companies that bottle tap water.
If you have a water softener, be sure to divert the softened
water away from the kitchen tap connected to the reverse osmosis system.
Avoid drinking distilled water as it has the wrong ionization,
pH, polarization and oxidation. It will also drain your body of minerals.
If you live in the country and get your tap water from a well,
you have a whole set of other concerns, including farm chemicals and other
dangerous materials such as contaminated sludge that could be applied to fields,
from antibiotics given to animals that can contaminate farm runoff, from your
own septic system, and so on. Be sure your water source is a deep, drilled well,
rather than a shallow, dug one. Have the water tested regularly and filter it
before use.
However you improve the quality of water from your tap, you’ll
be improving the quality of the environment by avoiding all those plastic
bottles.
Wendy Priesnitz is
the Editor of Natural Life Magazine and a journalist with over 30 years of
experience. She has
also authored nine
books.
Visit her
website.
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