The Bottled Water Debate?

The global bottled water market is rapidly increasing with approximately 600 million households consuming bottled water in 2018. That's more than 100 billion gallons (391 billion liters) of water per year or 1 million bottles per minute.

For the last few years, bottled water sales in the U.S have surpassed soda sales. This is good news as many people are looking for healthier beverage options. Currently, bottled water consumption in the U.S. is nearly 50 gallons per year per person.

Most of the people I talk with that prefer bottled water vs tap water do so for three main reasons. They assume bottled water is healthier than tap water, they prefer the taste of bottled water vs tap water and many like the convenience of bottled water.

Bottled water has been called the biggest marketing gimmick of all time. At 2000 times the cost of tap water we would expect it to be healthier and taste better than tap water, but does it live up to the hype?

Is Bottled Water Healthier than Tap Water?

Contrary to the image of purity advertised by the bottled water industry, bottled water may contain a lot more than simple H2O. In 2008, testing commissioned by Environmental Working Group (EWG), found 38 pollutants in 10 brands of bottled water, including disinfection byproducts, industrial chemicals, radioactivity, and bacteria. The Natural Resources Defense Council conducted a four-year review of the bottled-water industry and its safety standards, NRDC concluded that there is no assurance that bottled water is cleaner or safer than tap. In fact, an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is tap water — meaning that they were chemically indistinguishable from what comes from the faucet. They tested 103 bottled waters and detected potentially harmful contaminants, including microbes and regulated chemicals in about 50% of the samples tested.

Many recent reports have looked at microplastics in bottled water. It has been estimated that one bottle of water can contain up to hundreds of tiny plastic particles that we're drinking down with bottled H2O. One author estimates that the amount of plastic consumed per week is could be as high 5 grams which are the equivalent weight of a credit card.

Another major concern regarding bottled water is the ingesting of endocrine disruptors such as bisphenol A (BPA). Low dose exposure to BPA has been linked to many health problems including obesity infertility, early onset of puberty, hormone-dependent cancers such as prostate and breast cancer, lower testosterone levels and sperm production and heart disease.

Bottled Water Tastes and Smells Better than Tap Water.

Many people prefer not to drink municipally treated tap water. Often, this is for aesthetic reasons. They don’t like the way tap water tastes or smells. One good aspect of tap water is that it is monitored and treated to kill pathogenic micro-organisms. This is usually accomplished with chlorine treatment or other types of similar halogens. The treatment of municipally treated water with these compounds can, but not always, results in an unpleasant taste and smell.

Many blind taste tests have shown that many times people prefer the taste of tap water over bottled water or cannot distinguish the difference between the two. ABC’s Good Morning America conducted a blind water taste test with the following results as to the be best tasting water.

12 percent Evian
19 percent O-2
24 percent Poland Spring
45 percent New York City tap water

Yorkshire Water, the water department in Yorkshire, England, found that 60 percent of 2,800 people surveyed could not tell the difference between the local tap water and UK bottled water.

The hosts of Showtime’s television series Penn & Teller: Bullshit conducted a blind taste test comparing waters. The test showed that 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred city tap water to bottled waters. The hosts of the show conducted another test in a trendy Southern California restaurant. A water sommelier handed out water menus with extravagant prices to the patrons. The patrons had no idea that all of the fancy bottles of water were filled with the same water from a water hose in the back of the restaurant.

Patrons were willing to pay $7 a bottle for “L’eau du Robinet” (French for “tap water”), “Agua de Culo” (Spanish for “ass water”), and “Amazone” (“filtered through the Brazilian rainforest’s natural filtration system”). The fancy bottles and exotic names were enough to convince the taste buds that they were experiencing pure bliss.

So then, why might bottled water taste better? It’s because we expect it to taste better. I other words, it is very effective marketing.

Convenience

The other reason people tell me that they choose bottled water is that it is convenient. My response to that is, don’t we all too often trade convenience at the expense of our health? We do.

Although it is convenient to purchase bottled water, it is not convenient for our Planet.

Single-use water bottles are wreaking havoc on the environment.

There are over 100 million plastic bottles used each day globally and nearly 80% of these end up in our landfills. Approximately 1500 bottles end up in landfills and the ocean every second. Globally, people go through roughly 200 billion plastic water bottles annually.

Most single-use bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (“PET”), a plastic produced from the byproducts of the oil industry. The manufacturing, bottling, transporting, and refrigerating of bottled water uses an estimated 32-54 million barrels of oil annually in the US, with 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. Also, approximately 3 liters of water are used to produce 1 liter of bottled water, meaning millions of liters of the valuable liquid are squandered during the process. Given these figures, bottled water requires 2,000 times more energy to produce than tap water and at a hefty cost to our planet.

To make matters much worse, out of the 35 billion single-use bottles used every year in the US, less than 30 percent is recycled. For this reason, approximately 20 billion single-use plastic bottles end up in our landfills and bodies of water each year. Since plastic bottles take up to 450 years to biodegrade, the planet could soon be drowning in a sea of plastic. By 2050, plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish, predicts a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum.

Our Self Care bottom line, Say No to Bottled Water. Make choices that are healthy for Ourselves, our Planet and our Wallets.

Drinking plenty of water is good for your health, but both tap and bottled water can contain contaminants that may be harmful. An efficient and cost-effective way of providing yourself and your family with healthy water is the filtration of tap water. There are many types of systems to accomplish this. Common methods of filtering can remove the chemicals, but also removes healthy components that nature intended in our water. This will be the context of our next Healthy By Choice class.

Please join us and invite guests for our next Class, The Bottled Water Debate on Tuesday, March 3rd at 9 pm Eastern, 6 pm Pacific. Together we can all help anyone Be Healthy by Choice. To Join the broadcast click this link and follow the prompts www.theroyalalliance.com/live see you on Tuesday.