Tapping into the bottled water myth

Friday, June 5

Your statistic of the day: Bottled water costs 1,900-times more than the stuff you get out of the tap in your home. And it’s probably not any safer.

You may have long suspected, as I have, that bottled water has grown into one of the biggest marketing scams of the last century. Just in the past 25 years alone, companies have talked consumers into one very powerful, basic belief: tap water bad, bottled water good.

For another take, Good Magazine spoke with a toxic researcher from The Environmental Working Group. What he said boils down to this: tap water bad, bottled water bad.

The researcher, Nneka Leiba, contracted with a lab to look for 200 contaminants in 10 major brands. They found 38 pollutants averaging eight per brand. “We decided not to disclose the brands, because we wanted it to be a snapshot of the industry at the time,” Leiba told the magazine on June 4. “The only two brands that we name are Sam’s Choice and Acadia, because those two looked remarkably similar to tap water.”

The testers found disinfectants, heavy metals and industrial pollutants in bottled water. Residual pharmaceuticals have been found in tap water as well, since municipal filtering systems can’t get them all out.

You may wonder how this bottled water phenomenon bubbled up in the first place. A lot of people point to the rise of Perrier back in the 1970s. But the industry does have an actual history.

America’s first real bottled water came from Poland Springs, Maine, 150 years ago. It was sold in stoneware jugs for 15 cents. In those days, people were looking for spring water with medicinal properties. Other spring water appeared on the market as well, some of it touted as “a miracle cure” for ill health.

The modern trend can arguably be traced back to an EPA study in the 1970s which scared the daylights out of consumers, according to an analysis at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington.

With that as an opening, enter the Madison Avenue marketers. They sold bottled water with brilliant labeling—pictures of glaciers and other scenes of purity and natural beauty.

The Natural Resources Defense Council did a four-year study of bottled water a decade ago and found that “bottled water sold in the United States is not necessarily cleaner or safer than most tap water.” The report estimated that about a fourth of all bottled water at that time was actually bottled tap water.

One brand they looked at more closely had a label with a lake surrounded by mountains. The organization said the water “was actually from an industrial parking lot next to a hazardous waste site.”

By the way, The Environmental Working Group’s Leiba has a simple suggestion: Run your tap water through a carbon filtering system. It’s not perfect, but may actually be better than what you lug home from the store. And at least it’s cheaper.