Bottled
water is drinking water
By DW Hamilton
It is
true that consumers world-wide are
becoming ever more cautious about
the threat of “contamination,”
choosing mass-marketed products
guaranteed to make our homes and
persons temples of
hyper-cleanliness. Personally,
I’ve always lived by the adage,
“That which does not kill you will
make you stronger.” Case in
point: I’ve never understood the
allure bottled water holds for
Europeans. In Europe you are hard
pressed to get a glass of tap
water in a restaurant. One hopes
that at around $2.00 a pop, the
bottled stuff is at least
spring water or
mineral water, but
often it is actually very close
to, or in fact is,
tap water. For health
reasons, it is preferred by many
in areas where the water is
considered
polluted or
infested. But in most
countries where bottled water is
popular,
tap water is in fact
perfectly healthy to drink
straight from the tap.
Bottled water is a somewhat
contentious topic in the United
States, where ironically, the US
Environmental Protection Agency
sets more stringent quality
standards for tap water than does
the FDA for the bottled water. In
the US, I try to drink at least 8
glasses of tap water daily, and I
feel fine.
Despite, that, according to the
Beverage Marketing Corporation,
the US is the largest market for
bottled water, at nearly 26
billion liters in 2004, or one
8-ounce glass per person per day.
Italy has the highest average
consumption per person, at two
8-ounce glasses per person daily.
Meanwhile in 2004,Germany consumed
10.3 billion liters of bottled
water, while France downed 8.5
billion liters.
Some
claim that the demand for the more
expensive brands of bottled H20 is
a form of
snobbery. Many brands
focus on the taste and purity of
the water; however, pure water has
no taste. In 2003,
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!,
a
Showtime television
program, conducted a bottled water
taste test. They found nearly 75
percent of New Yorkers preferred
tap water to bottled waters. They
hired a "water
sommelier" to sell $7
bottled water to the patrons of a
fancy
Californian restaurant.
The sommelier filled each bottle
with a garden hose directly from
the tap, however, people claimed
to know the difference between a
bottle of eau du robinet
(French for "faucet water") and
Agua de Culo (Spanish for "ass
water") before they were informed
of its source. In the end, the
hosts
Penn and Teller
jokingly offered to sell their
brand of water for $150 per
bottle.
Bottled water can cost up to
10,000 times the amount of tap
water by volume. That is,
maintaining municipal water
systems typically costs 0.1-0.2 US
cents per gallon, while a ½ liter
bottle of water at 99 US cents
ends up costing around US$8 a
gallon.
Nearly
a quarter of all bottles of water
have been
shipped internationally,
by
boat,
train, and
truck. Putting water
into little containers and lugging
it around is comparitively
inefficient, both in terms of
energy and time. Bottled water
has a significant cost to the
environment in the form of the
discarded plastic bottle made of
polyethylene terephthalate
(PET), a
synthetic
plastic obtained by
refining
crude oil. It takes
more than 1.5 million barrels of
oil a year to manufacture enough
bottles for the US, enough to fuel
100,000 cars. Eighty-six per cent
of such bottles in the US end up
as garbage, and when disposed in
landfill, are expected
to take up to 1000 years to
biodegrade. Incineration
produces toxic
byproducts such as
chlorine gas and
ash containing
heavy metals, which in
turn may find themselves in the
water table.
The
cost to provide, by 2015, adequate
drinking water to half of the 1.1
billion people on the earth whose
water supply is insecure ($15
billion per year), would be far
less than the cost spent on
bottled water ($100 billion). For
the purists among us, these are
points to keep in mind, next time
we turn our noses up at tap
water.
(Information provided by
Wikepedia.com)
©
2006 All content property of European Weekly unless where otherwise
accredited
