San Pellegrino and Perrier got rich off the pretensions of liberal wastrels like moi who thought it set us apart from the unlettered masses. We ordered it in restaurants for the same reason we read books we don’t like and go to operas we don’t understand – we say to the waiter, ‘Perrier,’ to give a continental touch to our macaroni and cheese. Enough. Man is capable of reform once presented with the facts, and the fact is that bottling water and shipping it is a big waste of fuel, so stop already. The water that comes to your house through a pipe is good enough, and maybe better. (Garrison Keillor, as quoted in a Sept. 29, 2007 article in the Salt Lake Tribune; source).
Tap water may, indeed, be better for you, and it’s certainly better for the planet. One type of oil spill you don’t hear much about has to do with plastic waste, particularly plastic water bottles. Worldwide, 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year (OneWorld), and, according to the Earth Policy Institute, 1.5 million barrels of oil is used annually to produce plastic water bottles for America alone – enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year: “Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That’s about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle (National Geographic).
“Sales of plastic water bottles 1 liter or less increased more than 115%, from 13 billion in 2002 to 27.9 billion in 2005. Americans will buy an estimated 25 billion single-serving, plastic water bottles this year [2007]. Eight out of 10 (22 billion) will end up in a landfill. More than 2.4 billion pounds of plastic bottles were recycled in 2008. Although the amount of plastic bottles recycled in the U.S. has grown every year since 1990, the actual recycling rate remains steady at around 27 percent” (source). “Americans alone toss 2.5 million plastic bottles into the sea every hour” (source).
Not only can bottled water cost up to 10,000 times more per gallon than tap water, but “because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for tap water are more stringent than the Food and Drug Administration’s standards for bottled water, you’ll be drinking water that is just as safe as, or safer than, bottled”. “Forty percent of all bottled water comes from municipal sources (i.e., tap water), and 22% of tested bottled water brands contained contaminants at levels above strict state health limits (source). Furthermore, the bottled water you purchase is often in #1 PET or PETE bottles (polyethylene terephthalate), which may leach DEHA, a known carcinogen, if used more than once (attributed to Mothering.com), and there is increasing evidence of adverse health effects tied to Bisphenol A, or BPA, a widely used chemical in the manufacturing of plastic polycarbonate bottles, including baby bottles, water bottles, and food / beverage containers (source).
So, maybe it’s time to get off the bottle. Not only will the bottles themselves be with us forever since plastic doesn’t biodegrade, but the manufacturers would like you to believe that the water is “nothing but pure refreshment” (Aquafina slogan) – perhaps another of Aquafina’s slogans is more telling: “So pure, we promise nothing” (source). “There is enough water for human need, but not for human greed” (Mahatama Ghandi).
Article by Bill Norrington
