In 1979 I started drinking bottled water. My bottles, however, contained tap water and were nestled in small cages on the frame of my racing bicycle.
Tap water was good enough then because we did not know how much healthier and tastier bottled water is. It must be, because Americans today spend more than $4 billion a year on it, paying 240 to 10,000 times more per gallon for bottled water than for tap. Bottled prices range from 70 cents to $5 per gallon, versus tap prices that vary from 45 cents to $2.85 per thousand gallons. We would not invest that amount of hard-earned sweat for nothing, would we? Apparently we would.
In March 1999, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) published the results of an extensive four-year study in which they tested more than 1,000 samples of 103 brands of bottled water, finding that “25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle—sometimes treated, sometimes not.” If the label says “from a municipal source” or “from a community water system,” it’s tap water.
Even more disturbing, the NRDC found that 18 of the 103 brands tested had, in at least one sample, “more bacteria than allowed under microbiological-purity guidelines.” About one fifth of the waters “contained synthetic organic chemicals—such as industrial chemicals (e.g., toluene or xylene) or chemicals used in manufacturing plastic (e.g., phthalate, adipate, or styrene),” but these were “generally at levels below state and federal standards.” The International Bottled Water Association issued a response to the NRDC study in which they state, “Close scrutiny of the water quality standards for chemical contaminants reveals that FDA bottled water quality standards are the same as EPA’s tap water standards.” Well, that’s a relief, but in paying exceptional prices one might hope for exceptional quality.
One problem is that the FDA assigns less than one full-time employee to enforce compliance with bottled water regulations, which do not even apply to waters packaged and sold within the same state (about 65 percent of all sales), and are subject to less rigorous and frequent testing and purity standards for bacteria and chemical contaminants than those required of tap water. For example, bottled water plants must test for coliform bacteria once a week; city tap water must be tested a hundred or more times a month.
Spring water may call forth images of clean glacial runoff, but for some bottlers it is simply another season when their water is pumped out of wells and filtered, which FDA rules allow. Alaskan Falls water, for example, is bottled in Worthington, Ohio; Everest water springs from the municipal water supply of Corpus Christi, Texas.
If bottled water is not safer (a 2001 World Wildlife Fund study corroborated the general findings of the NRDC), then surely it tastes better. It does … as long as you believe in your brand. Enter the water wars hype. Pepsi preempted Coca-Cola with its blue-labeled Aquafina, so Coke countered with Dasani, a brand that includes a “Wellness Team” (meet Susie, Jonny, and Ellie, the “stress relief facilitator,” “fitness trainer,” and “lifestyle counselor,” respectively, gleefully imbibing on the Dasani web page). Both charge more for their water than for their sugar water.
If the test is blind, however, the hype falls on deaf taste buds. In May 2001 ABC’s Good Morning America found viewers’ preferences to be Evian (12 percent), O-2 (19 percent), Poland Spring (24 percent), and good old New York City tap (45 percent). In July 2001 the Cincinnati Enquirer discovered that on a 1-to-10 scale the city’s tap was rated at 8.2, compared with Dannon Spring Water’s 8.3 and Evian Spring Water’s 7.2. In 2001 the Yorkshire water industry found that 60 percent of the 2,800 people tested could not tell the difference between its own tap and the United Kingdom’s most popular bottled waters.
The most telling taste test was conducted by Showtime’s television series Penn and Teller’s Bullshit. They began with a blind comparison in which 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred city tap to the most expensive bottled waters. They then went to the left Coast and set up a hidden camera at a trendy Southern California restaurant that featured a water steward who dispensed elegant water menus to the patrons. All bottles were filled out of the same hose in the back; nevertheless, Angelenos were willing to plunk down $7 a bottle for L’eau du Robinet (French for “Faucet Water”), Agua de Culo (Spanish for “Ass Water”), Mt. Fuji (with “natural diuretics and antitoxins”), and Amazone (“filtered through the rainforest’s natural filtration system”), declaring them all to be far superior in taste to tap water. There’s no accounting for taste!
Bottled water does have one advantage over tap—you can take it with you wherever you go. So why not buy one bottle of each desirable size and refill it with your city’s finest unnaturally filtered but salubriously delicious tap water?