Water, Water, Everywhere (Everywhere You Can Make a Buck from It)

I went for  swim at the Y a few days ago. When I plunked down my stainless steel water bottle by the poolside, my friend Carol asked, “What’s in that, coffee or water?”

“Good old Glosta tap water, of course,” I replied.

She blanched.

“I never drink tap water,” she said, “I only drink Poland Spring.”

“Oh,” said I. “Don’t you know that bottled water is a scam, and that it’s nearly all tap water anyway?”

She bristled, and was understandably defensive.

Not sure I hadn’t overstated my case, I nevertheless said, “You can look it up online.”

Of course I did too, as soon as I got home. 

For the most part, I had not overstated my case. In fact, it’s worse. The bottled water industry has succeeded in bamboozling much of the nation (heck, much of the world) into thinking municipal water supplies are dangerous and only bottled water is safe. They make pots of money out of this outrageous canard, and few if any public figures  speak out against it. Just look at television coverage or newspaper photos of almost any Congressional hearing, international conference, or public meeting and see the ubiquitous plastic bottles at each attendee’s place.

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing

At a UN Conference

 (A Google search of photos of presidential cabinet meetings as far back as Reagan’s, however, showed that the White House always served water – presumably from the tap -- in glasses, with not a bottle in sight). 

An Obama Cabinet Meeting

You can also Google “poison in tap water” and find dozens of lurid You Tube videos and web sites claiming that municipal water supplies are full of poison,  starting with that old villain fluoridation (once viewed as a communist plot), and including rivers of vaccines, discarded pharmaceuticals, and other assorted menaces, none of them, of course, detected or neutralized by standard water treatment procedures.

Bottled water is a huge global business, with or without the help of such scare stories. According to the New York Times (October 25), “Coke sold 5.8 billion liters of waters abroad and 253 million liters in the United States and Canada from 2007 to 2012. Pepsi’s water sales in North America actually declined by 636 million liters over that period, but it still sold 4.7 billion liters overseas.”

At the same time that the bottled water industry is expanding its global reach, public water supplies in most industrialized nations couldn’t be safer. Health and safety laws and regulations insure that filtration and treatment are conducted to the highest standards; and now tertiary sewage treatment plants are even producing an end-product -- water -- that is totally safe for public consumption (though there’s a an understandable public reluctance to try it out).

Speaking specifically to the question, "Does Poland Spring water actually come from underground springs?" the answer appears to be yes; though the original spring in Poland, Maine was pumped dry nearly 50 years ago, the parent company (Nestlé) does put spring water from Maine and elsewhere in its Poland Spring bottles. But more than half the water sold by others as "natural" or "spring" water comes right out of the tap, particularly that sold by the big two bottlers, Coca Cola (Dasani) and Pepsi-Cola (Aquafina).  Look at the label; if it says “purified water” or “municipal water supply” it’s tap water.

And, irony of ironies, Poland Spring is selling its bottled spring water to buyers in Maine communities that are already getting the same water from the same springs out of their own wells. Talk about selling iceboxes to Eskimos!

But that's beside the point. Study after study has shown that municipal tap water is as healthy or healthier than bottled water, and infinitely cheaper.  Of course it's treated, and we should all be glad of it. Sometimes it tastes funny, as it has here in Gloucester the past few days when they had to switch to chlorine instead of the less noticeable chloramine while refurbishing and refilling two big storage tanks at Plum Cove and Blackburn Park. But it’s safe to drink. And bottled water has additives too.

The bottled water industry is carrying out a world wide scam job. Somehow they have persuaded millions of people worldwide -- not just in America -- that municipal tap water is dangerous. In some parts of the world where there is no publicly treated water they may be right, though portable water purifiers are extremely simple and cheap and readily available.

But in the industrialized world there's no excuse, and many reasons not to turn to bottled water. Not only are treated water supplies safe; tap water is far cheaper, tastes good, and is readily available. Bottled water comes in non-biodegradable containers made from petroleum-based products, uses still more petroleum to transport it, and while some of the used bottles are recycled into items like road surfacing materials and synthetic lumber, more often they are thrown away. Empty water bottles constitute a huge proportion of America's trash problem. They are not biodegradable, and not redeemable for a deposit in most states. Consequently millions of tons of them wind up in landfills or are thrown away by the roadside or into rivers, streams, and oceans, where they add to Texas-sized “gyres” of  plastic refuse, circling endlessly in mid-ocean.

Trying to Paddle in the Pacific Gyre

But the industry has put on heavy advertising campaigns to persuade people that their products will make people healthier, stronger, sexier, and that therefore we should all shell out many times what we pay for tap water. Bottled water prices keep dropping, but even at today’s prices that are sometimes as low as 16¢ per liter for bottled water, treated tap water costs less than 1¢ a gallon. So people who buy bottled water are still paying more than 600 times what they would pay for tap water…and unless you’re the homeowner who pays the water bills, you’re paying nothing! 

Furthermore, bottled water is not healthier and may be less so. There's no added fluoride in it, for example, which is essential for healthy teeth. The American Dental Association has estimated that there has been a 20-40% reduction in incidences of tooth decay since additional fluoride has been introduced into most municipal water supplies (some fluoride already occurs naturally in water -- including bottled water).

There's not a whole lot to be said in favor of bottled water. 

Even if it does make you feel kind of sexy.