Step Away from the Bottle

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Everyone’s doing it. Look around. See how many people have one in their hand right now? They take them everywhere; buy them in packs at the store, heedless of the danger every time they put it to their mouths. Bottled water, it’s not as healthy as you think it is.

Sure some of it comes from bubbling springs way up on some mountain, but more than 25 percent of it comes from a municipal supply. They dress it up, make it smell nice and then sell it to us for a price higher per gallon than gasoline. The bottlers aren’t required to tell us that it’s glorified tap water, so they don’t.

They also don’t have to let consumers know if their product becomes contaminated even though recalls happen. “Between 1990 and 2007, this happened about 100 times,” says Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. Some of the reasons for recall: contamination with mold, benzene, coliform, microbes, and even crickets. Ew.

Bottled water is hardly regulated for safety. The EPA regulates tap water, while the FDA oversees bottled. Yet FDA doesn’t regulate water packaged and sold within the same state, leaving some 60 to 70 percent of bottled water, free of FDA regulation. That leaves testing to be done by states themselves, but the NRDC found that they often don’t have enough resources to oversee bottled water, and in some cases lack even one full-time person for an entire state.

So what if you make sure and buy really clean spring water in a bottle, is it safe then? That depends on you. Most bottled water comes in polyethylene terephthalate bottles which are generally safe. But when stored in hot or warm temperatures (like your car), the plastic may leach chemicals into the water. Antimony is a potentially toxic material used in making PET. Last year, scientists in Germany found that the longer a bottle of water sits around (in a store, in your home), the more antimony it develops. High concentrations of antimony can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. I just want some water!

Oh, and let’s not forget the environmental impact here. Virgin petroleum is used to make PET, and the more bottles we use, the more virgin petroleum will be needed to create new bottles. Fossil fuels are burned to fill the bottles and distribute them. And let me point out that it’s not just bottled water, but juices, soda and other beverages packed in plastic that add to this waste.

Then there’s the waste of the bottles themselves. Less than 20% of them get recycled. The rest are just sitting around in landfills, where they will wait for thousands of years to decompose.

So what’s a person to do? Filter your tap if you want that clean taste and carry it around in a stainless steel bottle (which can be down right neat). If you must have bottled, look for brands that are NSF certified or belong to IBWA, and store in in a cool place. And don’t forget to recycle, not reuse.