Tapping into the Truth About Bottled Water
Posted July 10, 2009 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the Environment, Living Sustainably, Solving Global Warming
Today, Tapped will premiere at the Maine International Film Festival. I was lucky enough to be a part of this wonderful and very important project. The documentary, from the producers of "Who Killed the Electric Car," exposes the billion dollar bottled water industry and its contribution to global warming, resource depletion and waste while exposing the reality that NRDC began to bring to light in our 1999 bottled water report: Pure Drink or Pure Hype.
Despite a growing awareness that bottled water is not any better than tap water and often worse, people continue to buy bottled water in alarming numbers. Water continues to be bottled from exotic and sometimes ecologically sensitive sources (or sometimes it just straight from a tap like yours), pumped in to petroleum-based plastics that leach into the water as they sit in hot containers while they are flown or shipped thousands of miles across the globe contributing to global warming, sold at a huge premium to thirsty city-dwellers, leaving behind a veritable mass graveyard of bottles destined to spend decades in landfills, or worse - in the middle of the Pacific Ocean like the giant floating plastic garbage dump.
While all of these facts about bottled water are extremely troubling in and of themselves, one aspect of bottled water that has always been a big pet peeve of mine is the fact that I like to know what I'm drinking and what I'm giving my kids to drink. And as I explain in the film, when it comes to bottled water, we really don't know what we're getting.
A key finding in Tapped, as in Pure Drink or Pure Hype, is that because bottled water regulations do not require regular testing or ingredients listings, and most waters don't have to meet any bottled water standards, we really never know what we're getting.
At the national level, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for bottled water safety, but the FDA's rules completely exempt waters that are packaged and sold within the same state, which account for up to 70 percent of all bottled water sold in the United States (roughly one of every five states don't regulate these waters either). Even the bottled water that is tested is exempt from many of the standards and testing requirements that apply to tap water. For example, while EPA's rules clearly prohibit tap water from containing any confirmed E. coli or fecal coliform (yes - that's bacteria that indicates possible fecal contamination), the FDA allows fecal coliform--up to a certain level. Just what you need to cool down on a hot summer day!
And there's much more, but I don't want to spoil the movie for you. What I do want to do is encourage you to check out the website, Tapped the Movie, find a theatre, grab some friends (and a reusable, BPA-free water bottle) and go see Tapped.
Comments are closed for this post.
Comments
RB — Jul 10 2009 01:10 PM
Bottled soft drinks should be considered too. After all, bottled or canned soft drinks are 99.5% water. Soft drinks are merely water with a little sugar (HFCS), flavoring, and caffeine added. They have the same impact as bottled water.
Dr. James Singmaster — Jul 12 2009 02:52 AM
I wonder if anyone knows of several unmentioned problems with municipal drinking water operations. At present most operations are using chloramine, to which some people have violent reactions. Also my local water district sent out a flyer when switching over from chlorine to chloramine warning that some rubber interiors of some plumbing connections contained neoprene that may decompose. I now have one of those drain closers with a rubber sealing gasket that leaves black gunk on anything that touches it. I wonder what happens with chloramine in the intestines.
Chloramine is a quite reactive compound and can combine with dimethylamine, a very wide spread synthetic and natural chemical. It is a sizable component of rotting fish odors. The product formed in the reaction between those two chemicals is UDMH, the chemical problem brought up in the Alar fuss in the 80s.
Another problem was brought up with a mess at the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) in !993 as bad tasting water led to finding that the interior of a treated drinking water storage tank had a sealant containing polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs) in sizable amounts. A major mess ensued with contamination at a dump-out site to check what had happened reaching several hundred parts per million of PCBs indicating that people possibly had been drinking water with PCB levels many times above acceptable. EBMUD in a news report several months later indicated that its records showed that possible 116 out of 176 such storage tanks might have gotten the same sealant applied.It was supposedly checking about it, but no further public reports came out.
I wrote CA Senators about it, and they got useless responses from SF office of EPA. In summer 2000, letters to EPA in DC finally got someone's attention, and the official admit that there was a mess because, as I had said, claimed measurements for pollutants in drinking water are made after treatment but before the water goes to the storage tanks that one often sees at high points in communities.
Due to these problems I will keep drinking bottled spring water and not purified as chloramine and PCBs might still be present. Dr. J. Singmaster