The Great Bottled Water Debate
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.
“I know she ate a worm but we are not here to debate the de bait Deb ate.”
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.
Healthy by Choice
The Plastics Problem
The effect of plastic bottles on our environment has been documented and although we have an awareness of the problem it is getting worse not better.
Plastic, Plastic Everywhere: The Plastics Problem
In Mike Nichols film “The Graduate”, young college grad, Ben Braddock is given one word of advice for the future by Mr. McGuire, Plastics. As it turns out Mr. McGuire was quite prophetic, plastics are everywhere. It may have been good business advice but not necessarily good advice for our health or the health of our planet. Plastic is used pervasively but for this post I will concentrate on plastic water bottles. Many people are aware of the negative health and environmental impacts associated with plastic bottled water.
Environmental Burden
The effect of plastic bottles on our environment has been documented and although we have an awareness of the problem it is getting worse not better. There are over 100 million plastic bottles used each day globally and nearly 80% of these end up in our landfills. This means that only 20% are recycled. Approximately 1500 bottles end up in landfills and the ocean every second accounting for 2 million tons of plastic bottles that are landfilled each year. It takes 700 years before plastic bottles start to decompose and can take up to 1000 years to fully decompose. Virtually every piece of plastic that was ever made still exists in some shape or form (except for the small amount that has been incinerated).
According to the Ocean Conservatory, plastic bottles and plastic bags are the most prevalent form of pollution found on our beaches and in our oceans, every square mile of the ocean has over 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. Ten percent of the plastic manufactured worldwide ends up in the ocean, the majority of that settling on the ocean floor where it will never degrade.
Up to 13 million tons of plastic ends up in the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish.
Some of it is already finding its way into the human food chain. Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish. Last year, the European Food Safety Authority called for urgent research, citing increasing concern for human health and food safety “given the potential for microplastic pollution in edible tissues of commercial fish”.
Consumption of natural resources related to plastic water bottles is another concern. Producing the bottles for American consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil and an additional 18 million barrels are used to transport the bottled water. More energy is needed to fill the bottles with water at the factory, move it by truck, cool it in grocery stores or home refrigerators, and recover, recycle, or throw away the empty bottles. The Pacific Institute estimates that the total amount of energy embedded in our use of bottled water can be as high as the equivalent of filling a plastic bottle one quarter full of oil. Bottling water also wastes water, it takes three gallons of water to produce one gallon of bottled water. Key environmental issues with bottled water, according to environmentalist David Suzuki, are waste and uncertainty over the long-term health effects created by plastic. "Not only does bottled water lead to unbelievable pollution…but plastic has chemicals in it. Plastics are ubiquitous. I don't believe that plastics are not involved in a great deal of the health problems that we face today."
Any way you look at it, bottling water is a tremendous waste as far as resources and a major contributor to the pollution of our planet.
Health Effects: Our Body Burden
As I have written before (The Body Burden) it is estimated that each one of us carry an average of over 200 toxic chemicals in our body. Everybody is being exposed to some degree at any given time from gestation through death to toxic chemicals from plastics. Plastic bottles are known to release harmful chemicals such as Bisphenol A. BPA is an industrial chemical that has been used to make certain plastics and resins since the 1960s. BPA is found in polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. Polycarbonate plastics are commonly used in containers that store food and beverages, such as water bottles. BPA is one of many man-made chemicals classified as endocrine disruptors, which alter the function of the endocrine system by mimicking the role of the body's natural hormones.
A study of 77 Harvard College students found one week of drinking water from polycarbonate bottles increased the levels of BPA in by two-thirds (1). This suggests that regular consumption of water from such bottles significantly increases exposure to BPA. Bio-monitoring by the Center for Disease Control and other studies have detected levels of bisphenol A in the urine of 95% of the adult population of the United States.
Health problems associated with BPA’s include, overweight, early puberty, hypertension, ADHD, heart disease, liver failure, breast and prostate cancer to name a few.
One other contaminant that is associated with plastic bottled water is antimony. Antimony is a regulated contaminant that poses both acute and chronic health effects in drinking water. In small doses, antimony can cause nausea, dizziness and depression. In large doses, it can be fatal. The longer water is stored in plastic bottles, the higher the concentration of a potentially harmful chemicals can be, a recent study states.
Given the environmental impact of bottled water, the potential health risks that we know of, and the potential for risks we may not be aware of warrants serious consideration as to your choice for water.
When we consume bottled water, we pay far too much for it in terms of expense, our health and the health of our planet. Skipping the bottle is one step toward Being Healthy by Choice.
Visit the H2O shop for environmentally safe bottled water alternatives.