Tap Water Blues

As August arrives with a sweltering vengeance, sleek plastic bottled water containers undoubtedly will be a ubiquitous sight in parks, beaches, strip malls and jogging tracks across the nation.

Why is this the case, especially considering that America can boast of one of the safest, highest quality public water supplies in the world? For that matter, what effect is the disposal of billion of billions of spent plastic bottles having on our planet?

These issues and others were raised Aug. 1 in a New York Times editorial.

To its credit, bottled water is healthier than many other mass-produced items — soft drinks and liquid candy, to name a couple. On the other hand we are paying an exorbitant cost for bottled water, both in terms of our individual pocketbooks and long-term environmental effects.

Those of us who strive to get our eight-ounces of water a day exclusively from bottled water are shelling out as much as $1,400 a year for this luxury.

Meanwhile, the Earth Policy Institute estimates that it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil just to make water bottles for American consumption — an amount that could fuel about 100,000 cars a year. Only about 23 percent of those bottles are recycled. And this doesn’t include the fuel required to transport these bottles from sea to shining sea.

Less tangible but equally real is the toll our mass predilection for packaged water is taking on the nation’s public water supply. As more wealthy Americans opt for bottled water, what will become of tap water, widely acknowledged by experts as the qualitative equal of bottled water? One likely result, experts fear, will be a growing reluctance to invest in the nation’s public water supply — a technological achievement that, from a public health standpoint, has paid tremendous dividends for all Americans.

Aside from that, we may be exchanging a decades-old investment for an arguably inferior alternative, according to one expert.

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration now requires bottled water quality standards to be equal to those of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s criteria for tap water,” says Dr. Jim Hairston, the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s water coordinator and Auburn University professor of agronomy and soils. “But the quality of the finished product is not monitored.”

Bottlers are required to test source water and the finished product only once a year. Big city municipal suppliers, by contrast, may test their source waters as much as 100 times a month for the presence of E coli and other fecal coliform bacteria.

Hairston also cites recent tests, which have shown that microbes may grow in some bottled water products while they are stocked on grocery store shelves.
A dental health risk is also associated with some bottled water products.

“Some bottled water sold in the United States is fluoridated, but most was not as of 2005,” Hairston says, adding that current FDA regulations do not require these products to be fluoridated.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at August 1, 2007 07:26 PM