Bottled Water vs. Tap Water – Facts & 4 Reasons to Drink Tap

 

The Rise of Bottled Water

Bottled water has grown more and more popular over the last few decades. The IBWA estimates that in 1976, each American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water. By 2014, they were drinking more than 21 times as much. Today, more than one out of every six bottled drinks sold in this country is a bottle of water, making bottled water nearly as popular as carbonated soft drinks.

The IBWA attributes the growing popularity of bottled water to health-consciousness. A 16-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola has 190 calories and 52 grams of sugar, while a 16-ounce bottle of water has no calories, no sugar, and no artificial sweeteners. However, that doesn’t explain why consumers are choosing bottled water over tap water, which is also sugar-free and calorie-free.

Taste

One of the most common reasons people give for drinking bottled water is that it tastes better than their local tap water. For instance, in a blind taste test at the offices of Buzzfeed, staffers universally agreed that all the bottled waters they tried were better than the sample of unfiltered Los Angeles tap water, which tasters described as “pool water” and “disgusting.”

However, this result is actually the exception rather than the norm. In most blind taste tests, tap water easily holds its own against bottled waters, even the pricey ones. You can see the same result in numerous cities, both in the U.S. and abroad:

Safety

Many people choose bottled water because of concerns about the safety of their tap water. In many cases, these fears are perfectly reasonable.

Environmental writer Elizabeth Royte, author of the new book, “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It,” points out in an interview with NPR that more than 10% of the community water systems in the U.S. don’t meet the standards set by the Safe Drinking Water Act. Also, about 10% of all Americans get their water from private wells, which aren’t covered under the SDWA. That means about 60 million Americans are getting tap water that may or may not be safe to drink.

However, choosing bottled water isn’t really a solution. According to the EPA, the standards for bottled water in the U.S. are exactly the same as those for tap water – and bottled water isn’t subject to the same reporting standards as tap water. Under the SDWA, municipal water systems must send users a consumer confidence report once per year telling them where their water comes from and whether it meets federal standards.

Bottled water, by contrast, is considered a food product and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Under FDA rules, bottled water doesn’t usually have to state what source it comes from or what methods were used to treat it. A 2009 investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that only “a small percentage” of all bottled water companies give their customers access to the same information about their water that municipal water suppliers are required to provide.

The FDA monitors and inspects water bottling plants, but it considers this job a “low priority” and doesn’t do it on any kind of regular schedule. Moreover, if a bottler fails to meet federal safety standards, it can still sell the water. All it has to do is put a statement on the label, such as “contains excessive bacteria” or “excessively radioactive.” In 1999, the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, tested 1,000 bottles of water from 103 different brands and found that for about one-third of them, at least one sample was over the allowable limits for synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, or arsenic.

Germs are particularly likely to cause problems in bottled water. As the World Health Organization explains in its 2008 Guidelines for Drinking-Water Quality, “Some microorganisms that are normally of little or no public health significance may grow to higher levels in bottled water.” Food Safety News reports that in June 2015, 14 different brands of bottled water had to be recalled because of possible contamination with E. coli bacteria.

Fortunately, no one was sickened by this water, but problems with bottled water aren’t always caught in time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists 14 outbreaks of acute gastrointestinal illness caused by bottled water between 1973 and 2010.

Sustainability

When it comes to taste and safety, bottled water isn’t necessarily worse than tap water – it just isn’t better. However, when it comes to its environmental impact, tap water is definitely far greener.

The environmental costs of bottled water include the following:

• Water Scarcity. Fiji Water isn’t the only brand that comes from a place where water resources are limited. Many American brands get their water from drought-ridden California. Arrowhead and Crystal Geyser tap natural springs in the California mountains, while Aquafina and Dasani draw on the municipal water supply in California cities, according to an investigation by The Desert Sun. In fact, The Desert Sun reports that Nestle Waters North America gets its Arrowhead water from a spring in the San Bernadino National Forest using a permit that officially expired in 1988. To add insult to injury, the companies use still more water in the manufacturing process. A representative of the Coca-Cola company admitted to Mother Jones that its plants use 1.63 liters of water for every liter of bottled beverages they produce in California – including Dasani bottled water.
• Toxic Chemicals. Most water bottles are made from a kind of plastic called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. Manufacturing this type of plastic produces a variety of toxic chemicals into the air, including nickel, ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide, and benzene. According to a report by the Berkeley Plastics Task Force, making a 16-ounce bottle out of PET creates more than 100 times as much air and water pollution as making the bottle out of glass. Worse still, some of the toxic chemicals in the plastic can leach out over time into the water inside – particularly if the bottle is rinsed and reused.
• Energy Use. Bottled water uses energy at every stage of production: treating the water, manufacturing the bottles, filling them, shipping them, and keeping the water cold. The Pacific Institutecalculated in 2007 that just producing the bottles for the bottled water Americans drink used the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil. A 2009 Pacific Institute report, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters, concludes that across its entire life cycle, bottled water takes anywhere from 1,100 to 2,000 times as much energy to produce as tap water.
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Anything that uses fossil fuels also creates greenhouse gases. The Pacific Institute estimates that the manufacturing of plastic water bottles alone produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2006 – not even counting the emissions from shipping the bottles. According to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, that gives water bottles a carbon footprintequal to more than half a million passenger vehicles.
• Packaging Waste. The Pacific Institutecalculates that about 3.8 million tons of PET are used each year to make water bottles – and only about 31% of that PET gets recycled, according to a 2012 EPA fact sheet. The rest ends up in landfills or gets burned (releasing toxic chemicals such as dioxin in the process), or simply gets tossed aside as litter. Many discarded plastic bottles eventually make their way into the oceans, where they can prove deadly to fish, seabirds, and other creatures that swallow them.

Final Word

Water is a necessity of life. In a world where so many people have to trek miles every day to fetch their water from the nearest stream, Americans are very lucky to live in a country where clean, safe water is available at the turn of a tap. It’s just common sense to take advantage of this great privilege, instead of shelling out money for something that comes into our homes practically free.

That’s not to say that drinking bottled water is always a bad idea. For instance, when a flood or a broken pipe interrupts the local water supply, bottled water can be a literal lifesaver. Similarly, if you’re out at a concert or a ball game and you need to buy a drink, choosing a bottle of water instead of a bottle of soda is definitely the right choice for your health. However, when you have a choice between bottled water and tap water, either filtered or unfiltered, drinking from the tap is a better choice for your wallet and for the planet.