First things first. The quality of bottled water is no better than tap water and is in some cases worse. In Calgary the municipal water supply is tested 16 000 times a year to ensure that it meets Canadian Drinking Water Guidelines. How often do the regulations require that bottled water be tested per year? Less than 1000 including source and final product. Why the difference? Bottled water is regulated in the same way as food and beverages with less stringent testing requirements than municipal water supply. That said, in Canada bottled water is generally safe provided it is stored correctly. If the water was not chlorinated and is not refrigerated, bacteria can accumulate over time. When it comes to water quality, ask yourself is it worth paying more for bottled water? According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization bottled waters haven't got greater nutritive value than tap waters. If I offered you a can of Coke for 10 cents and then told you I have a can of a magical elixir that will fill you with energy and happiness called Pepsi. Would you give me $200 for the Pepsi? I know they are the same thing, but don't you think the Pepsi sounds better? In Calgary you can find yourself a 1/2 litre of bottled water for as little as $1 if you are lucky. How much tap water can you buy for the same dollar? 1000 L. Two things which are exactly the same except for the packaging and people are willing to pay 2000 times the price! Clearly we are not intelligent beings.
Let me move on to your backyard. What happens to all of these bottles? Worldwide only 20% of the water bottles are recycled. Every year about 1.5 million tons of plastic is used to make bottles for water. 80% of this is littering our landscape one way or another. What do 1.5 million tons look like? Plastic is transported in rail cars called hopper cars. Each year the world generates enough plastic waste simply from water bottles to fill about 17 000 hopper cars. If you connected those cars up they would stretch from Calgary to Edmonton. PET bottles take about 1000 years to biodegrade. By the time this year's bottles biodegrade we could circle the earth 10 times with hopper cars full of waste plastic. Think of this waste as the pus of our social illness.
Now that I have you thinking globally I will remind you about the Kyoto accord. Consumption of bottled water in areas where tap water is supplied generates more CO2 emissions. Here's how it works. Raw materials are sent by rail and pipeline to a place like Red Deer where plastic is made. Granular or pelleted plastic is shipped in rail cars to a place that makes it into plastic bottles. The bottles are boxed and transported by truck to the bottling plant. The lids are made of a different kind of plastic that is trucked in from somewhere else. The bottles are then filled and trucked to stores. People drive to the stores, pay very high prices for the water and then drive it home and refrigerate it. In contrast, tap water is withdrawn from the river, treated, pumped through a network of pipes and supplied pre-chilled to each sink. The main energy cost is pumping which is extremely cheap compared to making bottles and driving them around.
Have you seen the commercial with the dying man on the mountain asking his friend to recycle his water bottle? It's not so crazy after all. When you start to imagine all those rail cars full of plastic lining up between here and Edmonton you can understand that recycling is very important. With any disease, prevention is the best thing. Don't be a sucker for marketing. Bottled water quality is the same and sometimes worse than tap water quality. They charge you 2000 times the price. The bottles are littering the landscape. Finally, it will be a great shame if Canadian society is ill enough to miss Kyoto targets because they like their water to come in a magic plastic bottle with pretty pictures of mountain glaciers.
Health Canada on Bottled Water
