Bottled Water

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I had forgotten just how furious this phenomenon of bottled water makes me.

It has become a multi-million-dollar business that simply generates tons of used plastic waste for the landfills, and gives very little in return.  In a recent (agonizingly slow-moving) article, Peter Gleich describes the history, the politics and the economics of the bottled water phenomenon.

Basically, the bottled water industry has capitalized on the suspicions that people have about the cleanness of their drinking water.  The purity of water is a local thing, but a news story about a breakdown in water quality in, say, Boston, sends people in, say, Los Angeles, into a panic, all carefully orchestrated by the water interests.  As Consumer Reports reported back in the eighties, out of the twenty or so bottle water sources they sampled both in the lab and by tasting, plain old NYC tap water was second best, right after some mineral spring water that cost an enormous amount of money (and I remember had slight traces of lead in it).

Of course, the bottled water people keep about a few thousand workers employed across the USA, but let's be frank: it is spectacularly unproductive work.  The executives of this sector of the business world must be among the most cynical in the entire world.  One of these days they're going to be selling clean air out of bottles, and goodness knows that in certain parts of the country it is needed, because of the determination of citizens to cling to the most polluting variety of personal transportation that's available.  When that day comes, I will simply break down and cry, because the combination of gullibility on the part of consumers and cynicism on the part of the marketers will just make me so furious.

Firstly, public water sources in the US are among the best in the world.  Local laws usually require that the water authority supplies a quality report periodically, and of course their accuracy has to be verified carefully, and the reports have to be read carefully, and corrective steps taken when needed.  But you can drink water right out of your tap most of the time.  Ask your local high-school chemistry teacher whether there is any objective reason to believe otherwise.  I would expect him or her to assure you that the water is essentially safe.

Secondly, bottled water quality is highly variable.  The Consumer Reports article on the subject that I read decades ago reported that levels of lead and rare earth ions present was startlingly high in certain brands of bottled water.  Federal standards for bottle water are very relaxed for mineral spring water, since such kinds of water, drunk for centuries as medicinal aids, often contained certain minerals that we would not tolerate in regular tap water.  At one time, bottled water companies circumvented the stricter limits for plain bottled drinking water by claiming their product was "mineral water", which it wasn't.  There have been a few reports that certain companies were selling plain tap water as water out of mountain springs.  In a sense, it is not wrong to say that tap water is from a spring: all water that is drunk, unless it is from desalinated sea water, is ultimately from a spring somewhere.  But obviously tap water is not what a consumer expects when a bottle of water is purchased.  This degree of cynicism would incite me to violence, if it wasn't so amusing.

Thirdly, as Peter Gleich points out, buildings such as stadiums are often built without sufficient access to water fountains.  This helps the stadium authorities make money from water vendors (and soft drink vendors).  Such situations must be fought relentlessly.  The claim that stadium authorities have a fundamental right to exploit their customers for profit at the cost of depriving them of a simple, free source of plain drinking water is American Consumerism gone mad.  How long will it be before kids in elementary school have to bring money to school to buy bottled water?

Fourthly, the containers, be they plastic or glass, must form a huge proportion of the waste of most urban areas.  I don't know where to look for statistics, but most of the plastic containers I see blowing around in the wind are discarded water containers.  There must be reports from State Parks, for instance, that set out what proportion of their waste disposal efforts are due to dealing with water containers.

This means war.  I declare war on this ceaseless onslaught of bottled water propaganda that people are subject to all the time.  This is one industry that we must never bail out: bottled water.

P.S.
1.  Wikipedia supplies an annoyingly even-handed article on the bottled water phenomenon.

2.  The National Resources Defense Council reports that Aquafina, which is Pepsi's brand of bottled water, is entirely from municipal tap water.
3.  The NRDC also has done a survey of why people drink bottled water, and the results are on their website.  At right is a cleaned-up version of their chart.
4.  Consumers' Union is essentially a private organization that exists to provide reports of consumer products for its members, and those who buy their magazine, Consumer Reports.  Frequently, though, they provide public-service reports, alerting the public to situations that need some degree of public mobilization.  Here is a report on the safety of bottled water.  Evidently municipal tap water must satisfy stricter standards than bottle water.

Performing a Google search on bottled water resulted in a host of web articles, most of them critical of the bottled water industry.

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