The Truth About Water: Bottle vs. Tap | healthkicker

The Truth About Water: Bottle vs. Tap

Did you know that...

Bottled water is not safer than tap water. In fact, the federal government requires more rigorous and frequent safety testing and monitoring of municipal drinking water.

Bottled water is thousands of times more expensive than tap water. Compare $0.002 per gallon for most tap water to a range of $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon for bottled waters.

Bottled water hurts the environment. After millions of barrels of oil are used to produce and ship plastic water bottles, 75% of them land in the garbage or our waterways instead of the recycle bin.

To make 1 bottle of water, 3 times that amount of water is wasted in production.

Independent testing of bottled water conducted by the Environmental Working Group in 2008 found that 10 popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in 9 states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand.

American consumers drink more bottled water every year, in part because they think it is somehow safer or better than tap water. They collectively spend hundreds or thousands of dollars more per gallon for water in a plastic bottle than they would for the H20 flowing from their taps. Rather than buying into this myth of purity in a bottle, consumers should drink from the tap. Bottled water generally is no cleaner, or safer, or healthier than tap water. In fact, the federal government requires far more rigorous and frequent safety testing and monitoring of municipal drinking water.

In some cases, beverage companies use misleading labels, including marketing bottled tap water as spring water. In fact, as much as 40 percent of bottled water is bottled tap water.

Furthermore, the production of bottled water causes many equity, public health, and environmental problems. The big beverage companies often take water from municipal or underground sources that local people depend on for drinking water. Producing the plastic bottles uses energy and emits toxic chemicals. Transporting the bottled water across hundreds or thousands of miles spews carbon dioxide into the air, complicating our efforts to combat global climate change. And in the end, empty bottles are piling up in landfills.

Myth: Bottled water tastes better than tap water.
Fact: In taste test after taste test, people can't tell the difference. Corporate Accountability International's "Think Outside the Bottle" campaign has held countless taste tests comparing bottled water to tap water, as have many media outlets, from The New York Times to Cleveland's local TV news channel. The results generally favor the tap. Ultimately, however, the point isn't whether one tastes better than the other?its how our tastes are shaped by advertising, rather than by what's good for us. Between 10 and 15 percent of the price of a bottle of water goes to cover advertising costs. We not only buy their myths, it turns out we pay extra for them.

Myth: Bottled water is convenient.
Fact: What is more convenient than nearly-free water running from your kitchen tap, and from public sources in schools, parks, offices, and sports stadiums? Sadly, we have come to confuse "disposability" with convenience; but there is nothing convenient about shipping water thousands of miles from its source, or all the waste and other costs associated with needless production and disposal of plastics. More convenient than buying bottled water is buying a reusable bottle and filling it from public sources. The leading organizations that promote reusable bottles recommend stainless steel or lined aluminum as sturdiest and safest.

Myth: Plastic bottles are recyclable, and are being made with thinner plastics, making them increasingly "green."
Reality: Some 4 billion PET bottles end up in the U.S. waste stream each year, costing cities some $70 million in cleanup and landfill costs. A plastic water bottle can take up to 1000 years to degrade in a landfill; when plastic is burned in incinerators, it releases dioxins, some of the most harmful man-made chemicals that exist. And most recycling is actually downcycling: making lower quality products than the originals, and requiring the addition of virgin plastics and toxic chemicals in the process. There is nothing green about that.

Myth: Still, bottled water is green. I mean, it's got to be, it's water...
Fact: It takes about three liters of water and approximately 3.4 megajoules of energy to produce and sell a single liter of water in a plastic bottle. The 31.2 billion liters of bottled water consumed annually in the United States require more than 17 million barrels of oil to produce. According to the Container Recycling Institute, in the U.S. an estimated 144 billion containers were wasted in 2005. While recycling the bottles offers moderate environmental benefits, drinking tap water has a MUCH lower carbon footprint than drinking bottled water. That makes drinking tap water one of the best, and easiest, things we can do to reduce global warming.

Myth: Bottled water plants bring desirable jobs.
Fact 1: Bottled water plants bring few jobs.
Overall, bottled water facilities employ few people. In 2006, the nation? 628 water-bottling plants employed fewer than 15,000 people, so each plant averaged only around 24 employees.

As studies have shown, when a new bottling plant comes to a town, the couple dozen jobs it does bring benefit mostly people from outside the community, not the residents who gave up control over their water for the promise of jobs. In the long-term, one study says, a town's residents occupy only 10 to 40 percent of all new jobs created by overall employment growth.

A typical bottled water plant with 24 workers will employ between two and 10 local residents. This is a far cry from what towns expect when they sign control of their water away to corporate interests.

Fact 2: Bottled water plants bring low-wage jobs.
Local residents that do secure jobs at bottled water plants likely will earn low wages. A bottled water employee? annual earnings fall more than a thousand dollars short of what the average U.S. worker makes. Compared to a typical manufacturing job, bottled water workers are really losing out ? to the tune of $10,000 each year.

Setting the bar low is no way to lift up a cash-strapped community. If anything, it could further depress wages and scare away businesses that rely on households surplus income ? two losses that cut into a local government? tax base and drive down the local economy.

Fact 3: Bottled water plants bring dangerous jobs.
Such low wages can't possibly compensate bottled water workers for the risks they take every day at their jobs.

In 2006, bottled water manufacturing had one of the highest rates of workplace injury and illness. With one incident for every 11 workers, bottled water workers are injured and fall sick more than twice as often as the typical private sector worker. The injury rate of bottled water workers is also 50 percent higher than both the broader manufacturing industry and the construction industry. What's more, nearly half of these cases were so serious that they required job transfer or restricted duties at work.

These injuries and illnesses are often severe and can have lasting effects. Bottled water workers lose their hearing eight times more often than a typical private sector worker. They suffer three times as many sprains and strains, and they are caught in an object or piece of machinery three times as often. The work at these plants is so hard that bottled water workers experience overexertion three times as often as typical private sector workers.

What good is creating jobs that are so dangerous that injury prevents people from working them?

Bottled water wastes fossil fuels in production and transport. Bottled water production in the United States used the energy equivalent of 32 and 54 million barrels of oil to produce and transport plastic water bottles in 2007?enough to fuel about 1.5 million cars for a year. Rather than being recycled, about 75 percent of the empty plastic bottles end up in our landfills, lakes, streams and oceans, where they may never fully decompose.

Do you drink bottled water? How often? Will you change that and switch to tap and reusable water bottles? Thoughts?

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