Bottled Water, Anyone?

OK, this is for you, my friends with whom I have argued about the benefits of bottled water. To recap, the argument goes like this:

Me: I can't believe Americans spend 4 bazillion dollars a year on a product that is available in their homes for a fraction of a cent.
Misguided Friends: Ughh, I can't believe you drink that stuff! Tap water is so gross!
Me: Bottled water IS tap water.
Misguided Friends: Nu-uh! It's, like, the nectar of the gods!

Exhibit A is a two-year-old piece from The Guardian. It tells the story of a series of PR blows in Britain to Dasani, Coke's bottled water brand. It seems that Dasani was found to be tap water. Then the "highly sophisticated purification process" used to process it was discovered to be reverse osmosis. Finally, it turns out that one of the additives that go into Dasani (for taste) interacted with the ozone that is pumped through it and formed levels of a cancer-causing compound called bromate that were twice the legal level. So of course Coca-Cola was forced to recall the poisonous Dasani.

Now perhaps you think that I'm going to go down the "SEE, BOTTLED WATER CAN KILL YOU!" road. No indeed. As even The Guardian noted:

The legal limits are set to have a wide margin of safety, and the Food Standards Agency advice yesterday was that while Dasani contained illegal levels of bromate, it did not present an immediate risk to the public.

As we are often not told, there are tiny amounts of various poisons and contaminants from arsenic to insect legs in virtually everything we eat, drink and breathe. Below a certain level they don't really affect us and they would be prohibitively expensive, if not impossible, to remove. Legal limits are established in an attempt to codify an appropriate level, although as former President Clinton has shown, political games can be played with those limits as he allegedly did when, on his way out of office (January 22, 2001!) he lowered the legal amount of arsenic in drinking water by 80 percent, forcing President Bush to either leave it at the unnecessarily low levels or raise it back to where it was before and deal with accusations of poisoning the public ("BUSH RAISES ARSENIC LEVELS BY 500 PERCENT IN AN ATTEMPT TO KILL CHILDREN!!!").

Anyway, the point: Some, if not most, bottled water is tap water run through an reverse osmosis (RO) unit with additives for "taste profile". That is to say, it's a "taste profile" past what you can obtain at your kitchen sink for just a smidge more than free. Your bottled water costs about 1000 times more and comes in a disposable bottle that's headed to the landfill instead of using the extremely reliable and efficient water delivery system that is already in your house.

Bottom line: get used to the taste or buy yourself an RO system, because it's the economically and environmentally right choice.

Thank you.


filed: etcetera