I wrote last year that real environmentalists drink tap water, and as the bottled water industry continues to explode I think it's worth remembering that buying bottled water is basically for suckers. (Of course... the wife and I buy a $5 case a couple of times per month....)
When we buy a bottle of water, what we're often buying is the bottle itself, as much as the water. We're buying the convenience--a bottle at the 7-Eleven isn't the same product as tap water, any more than a cup of coffee at Starbucks is the same as a cup of coffee from the Krups machine on your kitchen counter. And we're buying the artful story the water companies tell us about the water: where it comes from, how healthy it is, what it says about us. Surely among the choices we can make, bottled water isn't just good, it's positively virtuous.Except for this: Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.) ...
We buy bottled water because we think it's healthy. Which it is, of course: Every 12-year-old who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a 16-ounce Coke is inarguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn't healthier, or safer, than tap water. Indeed, while the United States is the single biggest consumer in the world's $50 billion bottled-water market, it is the only one of the top four--the others are Brazil, China, and Mexico--that has universally reliable tap water. Tap water in this country, with rare exceptions, is impressively safe. It is monitored constantly, and the test results made public. Mineral water has a long association with medicinal benefits--and it can provide minerals that people need--but there are no scientific studies establishing that routinely consuming mineral water improves your health. The FDA, in fact, forbids mineral waters in the United States from making any health claims.
And for this healthy convenience, we're paying what amounts to an unbelievable premium. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.
This paragraph is misleading. Children and adolescents should definitely drink tap water rather than bottled water because tap water in most municipalities is fluoridated, and fluoride works wonders to promote strong teeth and prevent decay.
In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
It would be a lot more cost-effective and environmentally responsible to simply buy a nice bottle and refill it with tap water as necessary. In some circumstances (e.g., stopping at a gas station on a cross-country drive) tap water isn't particularly convenient, but the vast majority of the time it's much easier to acquire. And for those who complain about the taste of tap water....
Taste, of course, is highly personal. New Yorkers excepted, Americans love to belittle the quality of their tap water. But in blind taste tests, with waters at equal temperatures, presented in identical glasses, ordinary people can rarely distinguish between tap water, springwater, and luxury waters. At the height of Perrier's popularity, Bruce Nevins [the man who brought Perrier to America from France] was asked on a live network radio show one morning to pick Perrier from a lineup of seven carbonated waters served in paper cups. It took him five tries.
I'd like to perform a blind taste test with some of my friends. When I do, I'll report the results here.
A blind taste test would be easy where I live. The river we take much our water from has heavy mineral content, and it's apparently too expensive for the city to remove the taste. So we drink only bottled water.
Ben, they have to atleast meet the EPA standards for drinking water (that is if your State doesn't have stricter standards). If there is a higher concentration they will spend more on treatment and pass it on to the customer, which would still be a fraction of what bottled water costs. Plus you can take a lot of that taste out with a PUR filter and still spend a lot less than bottled water. But hey $1 a liter is a great deal compared to $3 for 100 cubic feet (748.05 gallons).
I'm no chemist, but I'm pretty sure that filtering won't help. The minerals that make this water taste so awful are dissolved in the water, just like salt is dissolved into seawater. I suspect that only distillation can really fix the problem, and that's very expensive. (If anyone ever discovers a cheap way to take the salt out of seawater, it will change the world.) The bottled water I buy basically is distilled water, with some minerals put back in for taste.
And the economics are tricky when you compare bottled water to mass treatment of city water. Only a tiny fraction of tap water goes to drinking. Most of it goes lawns, baths, dishwashers, and the like. So it would be a waste for my city to pay for extra filtration of the general water supply. It would be like watering the yard with Evian.
No distillation is not the only fix, and in fact I can't think of any municipal agency who uses it for treatment. When it comes to filtration, its only one part of the water treatment process, which is typically designed around three things, EPA standards, source water profile and the local demand.
There is a great way to take salt out of seawater it a combination of nano or micro filtration with reverse osmosis. The cost comes in with the power required to go against the natural course of things.
You may see it as a waste for the city to pay, but they have to by law. In fact much of the bottled water is merely tap water run through reverse osmosis (ie. Dasani & Aquafina) then add minerals for taste. Other bottled waters takes water from the exact same sources as many cities.
Most of the fear of tap water is clever marketing. When it comes down to it tap water has regulations just as strict if not stricter than bottled water and the EPA is far more diligent in the enforcement end of the business (whereas bottled water plants are low on the FDA priority list). Not to mention any water agency is required to produce water quality reports and make them available to the public every year (as well as requirements for public notification of certain levels of chemicals occur).
As far as economics being tricky, they really aren't. For a fraction of the cost of bottled you can get tap water which is just as safe if not safer then bottled water.
Oh this is a humorous take on it too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPAjUvvnIc
tP: I always know I'm going to get some good comments from you when I talk about water :)
Pirate, I don't think you've ever tasted the kind of tap water I'm talking about. It isn't about safety; it's about taste. I've lived in this area (the panhandle of Texas) for about 25 years, and I still can't stand the taste. I've heard about those tap-vs-bottled taste tests, and in most cities I would believe it. But now where I live.
With a in-home system (such as a carbon filter) you can knock out much of what causes the taste and odor problems in water and at cost of far less than bottled water. Of course the condition of your in-home plumbing can also affect the taste and odor of your water too and replacing that can go a long way to making it taste better.
A carbon filter operates differnetly from the more tradional sand filiter. The sand filiter relies on the spacing beween sand particles to prevent contaminates from passing by. However, a carbon filter works on the process of chemical adsorption ustilizing the excessively large relative surface area of the particles to adsporb impurities in the water (or air).