Bottled Water Wars

The bottled water wars are everywhere. They even arrived at Water Analytics shortly after we started up in 2010. As a company that is in the water space, I was determined to make it 100% bottled water free. Some employees thought I was being Draconian. Eventually, we came up with a compromise that, as we say in Rotary, is fair to all concerned. We settled on the proverbial office cooler. No water bottles—just a 5-gallon recyclable container.

The bottled water wars made it to the November issue of Consumer Reports. Not surprisingly, the article castigated bottle water as—on the whole—no better than tap water. Unless you live in Flint it is unlikely that bottled water is either safer or better for you than the stuff that comes out of your tap.

Here are some facts I’ve gathered from the CR report and a host of other sources:

1. It takes 1.63 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of bottled water.
2. Tap water is regulated by the EPA. Any violation of a maximum contaminant level (MCL) must be reported within 24 hours. Tap water must undergo disinfection and tested for pathogens. For example, testing for city systems must be tested for Coliform bacteria at least 100 times per month. Bottled water is regulated by the FDA. Coliform testing need only be done once per week.
3. Tap water costs a fraction of a penny. Bottled water costs between $1 and $8 per gallon. The price of bottled water is thousands of times more expensive than that of tap water.
4. Bottled water comes in plastic (PET) containers. In 2016 U.S. bottlers used 4 billion pounds of plastic and burned 64 million barrels of oil to make that plastic.
5. If the average person were to drink water exclusively from bottled water, he would consume 90,000 pieces of microplastic in a year.
6. Boil orders due to treatment plant mishaps make headline news. Not making news are the 50 product recalls in the past two decades for excessive chlorine, mold and fecal bacteria.
7. Sixty-four percent of bottled water comes from the tap, including two most popular bottled water brands—Coca Cola’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina. They do filter the water, but you could do the same with a cheap home filter.
8. Poland Spring water is not spring water. It’s groundwater—just like the water pumped by 33% of all U.S. drinking water plants.
9. Fiji water is also groundwater. It really does come from Fiji, but it must be shipped several thousand miles to

A 2010 study reported in the Journal of Sensory Studies a study of 389 consumers who tasted bottle water and tap water—all of varying concentrations of minerals. As long as total dissolved solids were in the range of 300 to 350 mg/l there was no statistical difference between the particpants’ preference of bottled water over tap water. Here in Andover, home of Water Analytics, the water tastes fine. In my city of Newburyport, the water is safe but the taste leaves something to be desired. So, I drink from my filtered refrigerator tap. The filter is a carbon filter and costs ten times more than an industrial strength canister filter one can buy at Home Depot but it’s still pennies a day to drink.

Want to know how good your tap water is? Just go to your town’s website and hunt down the oddly named Consumer Confidence Report (CCR). For instance here is Andover’s:  https://andoverma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/470/2018-Annual-Water-Quality-Report-PDF-?bidId=. Try getting the same report from your bottled water of choice.

It’s no secret that our clean water infrastructure is in need of fixing. In this country we lose six billion gallons of drinking water to leaky pipes every year. That’s about 18% of the water we treat—down the toilet—or, should I say, that never reach the toilet. It will take about a trillion dollars to upgrade our water infrastructure to upgrade and satisfy our growing clean water needs for the next twenty-five years—or $40 billion/year. But make no mistake: Our water is very safe. Flint, Michigan made headline news because the kind of mismanagement of its water treatment facility that led to its lead infested water is so rare. Thanks to the EPA and the 1972 Safe Drinking Water Act, chemicals and microbes in our drinking water meet the most stringent requirements of any country on the planet.

In 2012 a group of environmental activists in Concord, Massachusetts, an affluent town just west of Boston passed a warrant article to ban bottled water. Concord residents can still buy sugar laden soft drinks—a contributing cause of obesity in the U.S.—but they can’t buy zero calorie water. Apparently waste from plastic bottles is okay as long as it doesn’t contain just water. I may be opposed to buying bottled water, but I don’t believe that outlawing it is the answer. Education is.

Americans spend about $30 billion (and climbing) per year on bottled water. If we spent that money on upgrading our water infrastructure, we could cover three quarters of the cost to provide clean, inexpensive good tasting water through the next generation.