Bottled water vs. tap water: what you need to know

Speaking of bottled water (see last post), I might as well take this opportunity to talk about something I feel really strongly about.

People in the United States needs to stop buying into common insinuations that tap water is dirty, unhealthy, bad tasting, or unsafe. It's virtually all myth, propagated by well-intentioned but ignorant health-conscious people and probably encouraged by the bottled water industry, all mixed with a good dose of groupthink. And it drives me nuts.

The facts, as far as I can see, are this:

In the US, tap water is regulated at a very, very high standard on a federal level by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a utility, mandating constant testing for bacteria, microbes, and anything else harmful to human health. Any municipal water system serving over 25 people must meet federal standards, according to this article from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website, and those standards are very scrupulous. People in urban areas see their dirty rivers and get extra scared of what might come out of the tap, but the EPA's mandatory standards and rigorous testing, if anything, is even more strictly enforced in higher density areas, I bet. (I couldn't find any hard evidence online to back up what I've heard about New York City's water being the cleanest in the country, but its certainly a common belief among many people I know.) Virtually anything you need to worry about coming out of your tap, whether it be lead, brown water, or other contaminants, is most likely coming from your home or building's plumbing, which is something you should be calling your landlord about, not your senator.

Bottled water, regulated by the FDA under the umbrella of "food," also maintains high standards, but at the very least it can be said that what exactly those standards are is under debate. That FDA article I mentioned seems to suggest that bottled water is "providing a service for those whose municipal systems do not provide good quality drinking water" - useful for developing nations, but that conditional doesn't actually apply to anyone in the United States. This long, extensive article from emagazine seems to suggest otherwise though, calling the bottled water industry "largely self-regulated." Both articles agree that by law the FDA's bottled water standards have to meet EPA's tap water standards, but emagazine adds a pretty crucial detail:

...the FDA is allowed to interpret the EPA’s regulations and apply them selectively to bottled water. As Senior Attorney Erik Olson of the NRDC explains, “Although the FDA has adopted some of the EPA’s regulatory standards, it has decided not to adopt others and has not even ruled on some points after several years of inaction.” In a 1999 report, the NRDC concludes that bottled water quality is probably not inferior to average tap water, but Olson (the report’s principal author) says that gaps in the weak regulatory framework may allow careless or unscrupulous bottlers to market substandard products.

In the end though, I feel like a nalgene and a Brita (if you're really worried about tap water) should be just as good a substitute to a bottle as any. But I'm not writing this so you can find the cleanest possible water to drink - that's not what this blog's for. I'm writing because I just read this article about how the "drink local" movement is catching on in California and elsewhere following all of the talk (and actions) of "eat local," something you've probably heard of which I'll be devoting more space to in the future. Essentially, the article covers how some restaurants are switching (back) to bottled water for a variety of reasons. What stood out to me though was the thoughts of New York restaurateur Joseph Bastianich, who named one of the biggest and most obvious ones.

“Filling cargo ships with water and sending it hundreds and thousands of miles to get it around the world seems ridiculous,” Mr. Bastianich said. “With all the other things we do for sustainability, it makes sense.”

Emagazine's article I quoted earlier goes into way more detail on this and the whole issue in general - seriously, you should read the whole thing - but it does make sense at a pretty lowest common denominator level. Why are we shipping water from France and Switzerland and Fiji when everyone in the US has clean water sources within their state, if not their county? Not to mention the cost of refrigeration and the huge toll of all those millions of bottles filling up landfills which aren't biodegradable. Recycling is promising, but 9 out of 10 bottles aren't recycled, and in my opinion I don't see why anyone should be giving the bottled water industry another cent anyway. Just thinking about their profit margins makes my head spin.

I think the kicker for me is not even the fact that Americans are choosing the vastly inferior, more environmentally harmful, and more expensive option of tap water over bottled water. It's the attitude with which we scorn the rarity which is provided to us for next to nothing, an opinion shared by a New York Times op-ed piece from two years ago I found:

Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.

And of course, I'm not even going to get into the "duh" factor of outrageous bottled water prices. A bottle of Evian costs the same as 1,000 gallons of tap water in most American homes, but apparently Americans prefer paying that thousand-fold difference, something which I'm sure everyone, developing world or not, would find pretty peculiar if they just thought about it for a few minutes.

In the end, I just feel like there is so much misinformation and rumor-spreading that bottled water, with its familiar packaging and comforting brand image, will always win over a consumer who is afraid of all the tap water rumors and can't see exactly where it's coming from. But it doesn't have to be this way. From where I'm standing, I'd even rather be (hypothetically) wrong about tap water's cleanliness and be drinking slightly dirtier water that is so infinitely more environmentally friendly than be giving loads of money to something as irresponsible and harmful as bottled water. When you add up in your head the money and energy that goes into shipping all that plastic just to have it discarded and clog landfills, it makes sense. Think about it!

Hopefully the stigma on tap water's reliability will end as green living choices become more and more of a necessity for everyone. I remember once a friend of mine got super mad when I told him it was fine to fill up their cup with bottled water from my bathroom sink and he came back with a glass full of cloudy water. "See? You actually drink this? You're going to kill yourself! I knew it" he said (or something along those lines), left his glass on my desk, and went downstairs to find a Brita jug before I could respond. And I could see even then why many Americans felt the same way he did, trusting their gut. But by the time he was back upstairs, the cloudiness (just tiny bubbles probably from the tap's mesh, it turned out) had dissipated, leaving an identical glass of water to the new one he was holding in his hand. I'm sure I was annoyingly smug about it.

Photo by Flickr user Scott Wills.