Equal aqua?
Posted on Thursday, September 6, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/200684/
A dollar and a half will buy a 12-ounce bottle of water at most Arkansas convenience stores or about 4 tons of water through one of the state’s municipal water systems.
Which is better ? Depends on who you ask. But whether water comes in bottles or from the tap, opinions abound on its purity, its source and its containers.
Americans spent more than $ 11 billion on bottled water in 2006, according to the New York–based industry consulting firm Beverage Marketing Corp., up from about $ 7. 5 billion in 2001. They chugged 8. 267 billion gallons of bottled water in 2006, almost 10 percent more than in 2005, leaving no doubt bottled water has a following.
But San Francisco city employees have been banned from using tax money to pay for bottled water, and that city’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, has pushed for a study of the negative environmental impact of bottled water, resulting in the U. S. Conference of Mayors passing a resolution to that end in June.
Behind the push for the study is a Corporate Accountability International initiative, “Think Outside the Bottle,” that alleges that the bottled water industry is contributing to water scarcity and turning a “basic human right into an unaffordable luxury.” In the last 25 years, the advocacy group has also waged campaigns against tobacco, chemical and agricultural companies that they say pose dangers to public health or to the environment.
Environmental groups contend that the plastic bottles that consumers often throw out rather than recycle are filling landfills and that their very creation uses valuable petroleum resources. According to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, it takes 1. 5 million barrels of petroleum a year to make the plastic water bottles Americans use.
Breck Speed, chief executive officer of Mountain Valley Spring Co., favors comprehensive, mandatory recycling programs for all materials, including glass and plastic bottled water containers.
“The figures I’ve heard that I believe are most accurate are that one-third of 1 percent of landfill waste may be attributed to bottled water,” says Speed. “It’s very small.”
A spokesman for Waste Management’s Tontitown landfill could not say how much space is taken up by water bottles.
“I don’t think they have any idea,” the spokesman said.
The International Bottled Water Association recently took out full-page newspapers advertisements urging consumers to recycle the bottles.
But why bottled water instead of, say, soft drinks and other products sold in plastic ?
A Corporate Accountability International spokesman told The New York Times that it is a good starting point because water “is something people can have access to right out of the taps. It’s a way to protect the environment and protect your pocketbook.” NOT AT ODDS IN ARKANSAS
Bottled water industry officials and municipal water department heads in Arkansas say that they aren’t at odds.
“I don’t see us in competition with the bottled water industry, primarily because only a small percentage of the water that we provide is used for cooking or drinking purposes,” says Gary Hum, director of source and treatment at Central Arkansas Water in Little Rock.
In general, less than 5 percent of a municipality’s treated water is used for food or drink. Most of the water pumped to homes is used for showering, laundry, watering the lawn and the like.
Alan Fortenberry, chief executive officer of Beaver Water District, which has customers in Fayetteville, Springdale, Bentonville and Rogers, says the district produces 45 million to 50 million gallons a day and that less than 1 percent is used for cooking or drinking.
“I just don’t understand the need to spend the money on the cost of bottled water, considering it’s more expensive now than gasoline,” says Hum.
Speed has heard the gasoline comparison before.
“You may be able to find some imported water in a small bottle that you could multiply to do that, but we’ll deliver to your home for $ 6. 75 for five gallons of water,” says Speed of the Hot Springs company. “I dare anyone to find a gas station that will do that.”
Speed says that while he believes that bottled water is better, he doesn’t believe competition is the answer.
“We have never sold against municipal tap water,” he says. “I just don’t want to do the negative sell. So we’ve just always sold the positive aspects.”
Those positive aspects, he says, include taste and portability.
“We’re not replacing tap water,” says Speed. “Coke, Diet Coke are our big enemies. And you’ve seen in the last couple of years a decline in carbonated soft drinks [sales ]. Consumers are becoming more educated about what they’re drinking and are replacing sugary soft drinks with something that’s healthy — and gosh, there’s just nothing healthier than water.”
Rob Johnson, 54, of Little Rock, and his daughter Robyn, 13, almost always have bottles of water with them, but those bottles have usually been refilled with tap water.
“Tap water doesn’t taste any different,” says Johnson.
Debbie Asbury, 51, and her husband, Jacob, 40, of Little Rock, buy bottled water for convenience, often grabbing a cold one from the refrigerator as they head out the door. But they drink tap water, too. Their behavior is typical of consumers interviewed for this story.
“No one should assume that just because he or she purchases water in a bottle that it is necessarily any better regulated, purer, or safer than most tap water,” says a four-year study completed in 1999 by the National Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the environment and public health.
The study reports that “as much as 40 percent [of bottled water ] is derived from tap water — sometimes with additional treatment, sometimes not.
“ While most bottled water apparently is of good quality, publicly available monitoring data are scarce,” it continues.
The study calls for heightened federal regulations on the bottled water industry, including mandatory testing for microbial and chemical contaminants and labeling that discloses the water source and treatment. “If bottled water is so pure, why not prove it with full disclosure on the label ?” the study proposes.
THE SOURCE Pepsico’s Aquafina starts as tap water and is sent through seven purification processes before it is put into bottles that are stacked on shelves at grocery and convenience stores. The company announced at the end of July that it would have a “source label” identifying the product as tap water. In response, the International Bottled Water Association issued a statement saying, in part, that “IBWA supports the Food and Drug Administration’s previous determination that source labeling for bottled water is not necessary or required if a brand is in compliance with the FDA bottled water Standard of Identity, Standard of Quality, and other regulations; if a bottled water is drawn from a municipal water system and has not been further treated, FDA requires the label to state that it is from a municipal or community water system.” Mountain Valley’s water is drawn from a deep, cool spring in northern Garland County. The company has bought up hundreds of acres of the watershed to protect the spring. The water is also filtered and purified by ultraviolet light and ozonation, a process that kills bacteria.
Fortenberry says that because water bottlers are working with much smaller quantities of water, and with water designated solely for consumption, they have a better opportunity to filter and treat the water they bottle than most municipalities.
Still, he says, drinking bottled water is a social and aesthetic choice.
“I don’t know that it’s any safer,” he says.
It may be appealing to some people whose “sniffers and tasters” are sensitive to certain compounds in water.
When Beaver Lake “turns over” and the algae are stressed, it gives off a compound that causes the water to smell and taste differently. The chlorine added to water can accentuate those tastes and smells.
“Phosphorus in the water is not going to hurt you, nitrogen is not going to hurt you,” he says, “but it’ll cause you to turn up your nose when you go to take a shower or get a glass of water and get that earthy, musty smell.”
Bottled water purveyors typically filter and sometimes even flavor bottled water to improve its smell and taste. Fortenberry, however, says consumers can buy water filters for home use to remove the smells and tastes that they don’t like for less money than they would spend buying bottled drinking water.
TREATMENT Fortenberry says the biggest improvement in public health came with the chlorination of public water sources, which began in the 1930 s. “People started living longer, their health was better.” With the passage of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, water suppliers were required to monitor levels of certain contaminants and chemical additives in tap water and issue annual reports on their compliance. Microbiologist Michael Gealt is not opposed to bottled water, although he drinks tap water at home and where it is available when he goes out.
Gealt points out, though, that while bottled water is regulated as a packaged food by the FDA, the quality of tap water is overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA requires that there be no fecal coliforms, like E. coli, in tap water; FDA rules allow for one part per 100 milliliters.
“Now, one is not going to make you sick, but in terms of the stringency of the requirement, it’s less stringent that the one that’s set by the EPA for your tap water,” says Gealt, dean of the College of Math and Science and a professor of biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Some people worry about ingesting chlorine. The chemical kills any bacteria present at the water’s origin, and residual chlorine keeps the water safe as it travels through the distribution pipes and into homes.
Gealt says that chlorine can bind to organic compounds, trihalomethanes, which are known carcinogens.
“Extremely low concentrations of a not very potent carcinogen — I certainly would rather have a little bit of them in my drinking water than for me to get sick with a pathogenic bacteria that’s going to kill me,” says Gealt.
Others worry about the effects of the fluoride that is added to drinking water to boost dental health.
“Anything is bad for you in large concentration,” says Fortenberry.
“We fluoridate the water at normally around 1 part per million — a very small amount — but if you came out and ate a handful of the compound that I use to fluoridate it, you’d die. If you inhaled chlorine gas that I use — I put it into solution and then add it to water to kill bacteria — if you inhaled that chlorine, then you would die. If you drink too much water, you will die. So … everything in moderation.”
The Beaver district fluoridated Springdale’s water for many years because voters there asked that they do so; in the early 1990 s, voters in the district’s other service areas asked that their water be fluoridated as well.
Fluoridated bottled water is available from some companies.
Gealt contends that it is perfectly acceptable to drink tap water when it’s available in most situations, but there are reasons for buying bottled water, too. He drinks bottled water when traveling through countries where the water source is questionable, as well as when he is traveling through some of the nation’s smallest, rural water districts, where monitoring might not be as stringent as those in larger areas. He even picks up the occasional bottle of water when he’s out riding his motorcycle on a hot summer day and just needs something refreshing to drink.
“I think people need to be a little bit more judicious about when they drink bottled water and when they drink tap water,” Gealt says. “You see [bottled water ] everywhere in the world, but the U. S. has really gotten on this kick. And I suppose it is healthier than drinking Coca-Cola.”
Some people, like 30-year-old Michael Berkshire of Bryant, have been following the back-and-forth on bottled water versus tap water and will keep on buying and drinking both.
“We probably drink more bottled water than tap water, but we have one of those filtration systems at home,” says Berkshire. “Probably at home we’ll start drinking more tap water, but bottled water is just more convenient.”