What's Inside a Bottle of Water?
The ads are everywhere, imploring you to taste the purity of water from a far-off land. Gee, if it comes in a bottle with a picture of a waterfall on it, the water must be much cleaner than our municipal tap water, right?
Nope.
According to several studies, bottled water is not likely to be any safer or healthier than tap water. In fact, regulations for municipal water purity are much stricter than those for bottled water. Many bottled water companies use municipal tap water as their source, with perhaps a bit of extra filtration and a few minerals thrown in. One study determined that some bottled water has more bacteria in it than tap water does.
How much are we being charged for this tap water in a pretty wrapper? We are being charged up to 1,000 times more than we pay for municipal water, and anywhere from 250 to 1,000 times more than for a gallon of gasoline.
But the rip-off doesn't stop there. Each plastic bottle has been made from non-renewable fossil fuels, which means that each bottle is a little packet of global warming. To make matters worse, those packets have to be shipped to us, sometimes refrigerated, burning more fossil fuels and creating more air pollution along the way. Most plastic bottles don't even get recycled; instead, they are forever buried in landfills or tossed to the side of the road to become part of our plastic landscape.
So, bottled water really isn't the pure, healthy deal we were promised. What can we do instead? We can carry our clean tap water with us in reusable bottles for a fraction of the cost. Glass and stainless steel containers are always options, but the sturdiest, lightest choices are plastics. The safest are #2 (high-density polyethylene, or HDPE), #4 (low-density polyethylene, or LDPE), and #5 (polypropylene, or PP). Polycarbonate bottles (#7) can leach estrogen mimics when washed with heavy detergents, and single-use #1 bottles can release carcinogens as they break down, so stay away from those. You can find out what kind of plastic a bottle is made from by looking for the number on the bottom of the container.
Sources:
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Olson, Elizabeth. "Water in Tap Beats Bottled, Group Says." New York Times, 6 May 2001.
Standage, Tom. "Bad to the Last Drop." New York Times, 1 August 2005.
Whittelsey, Frances Cera. "Hazards of Hydration" Sierra, November/December 2003.
