Trouble brewing for bottled water?
Imagine a sea of bottles as big as Texas.
What’s In Your Bottled Water?
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Wednesday, July 8, 2009 – 12:17pm – Slate.com
Two new reports are calling for bottled water to be labeled with as much information as municipalities disclose about tap water. Meanwhile, demand for bottled water continues to shrink, thanks to the recession.
The reports, from the Government Accountability Office and the Environmental Working Group, both note that people know (or can easily find out) much more about what’s in their tap water than they do about what’s in their bottled water.
Before the recession hit, sales of bottled water were growing at double-digit rates every year. Between people coming to the realization that they can get water from their kitchen sinks and policy changes requiring large organizations to limit use, demand is now flat or sinking, according to the Associated Press.
Consumers are increasingly troubled not only by the insane amount of plastic used to make the bottles but also by the fact that bottled water often contains more contaminants than tap water does—or at least by the fact that they don’t know what bottled water might contain. And many consumers still believe that bottled water, simply by virtue of its being bottled, is safer than tap water.
A subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing today on regulating the industry.
Bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as state and local governments. Water quality standards are about the same for both, but the FDA, as usual, is toothless when it comes to enforcement, a fact highlighted in the GAO report.
Richard Wiles, senior vice president for policy and communications for the EWG, told the AP that if “municipal tap water systems can tell their customers this information, you would think that bottled water companies that charge 1,000 times more for this water could also let consumers know the same thing.”
Industry officials contend that we should just believe them when they say their product is safe. Joseph Doss, president and CEO of the International Bottled Water Association, actually testified that if consumers want to know what’s in their water, they can contact the company that makes it.
Dan Mitchell has written for The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Wired.
My comment: Maybe George Carlin (RIP) was right. In one of his bits he said that he had determined that the Earth wants plastic. That’s the reason humans were put here, to make plastic for the Earth. And that when the Earth gets enough plastic buried in it, there will be no further need for humans, and we will be shaken off like… well, you’ve probably seen the performance. In much of George’s writing he found an edge of truth where only he could stand. He went to the scary, truthful places and made us laugh (nervously sometimes) about it. It’s one of the best methods of teaching, you know.
And yeah, I just got the report of the analysis of our city’s tap water. It’s pretty dense going and I’m still trying to decipher it. Our water has tiny amounts of stuff I’ve still got raised eyebrows about. Should I ‘google’ all those scary little compounds and toxins, call a chemist, or just trust that my town’s water engineers know what’s safe to injest and what’s dangerous in the long run?
And if you do buy bottled water (hopefully spring water) I assume you do recycle the plastic bottles, right? Every time you take a sip, think of your bottle resting in a landfill for thousands of years, or floating in a state-sized collection of plastic crap on one of our oceans (it’s happening now!)
And, for a fresh view on the unsustainable consumer treadmill, see: http://www.wimp.com/thingswork/
