Is the bottle in hot water?

Looking at a map of Canada you have to ask why. Canada is home to the five Great Lakes, a myriad of smaller lakes, mountain streams and glaciers, wells and aquifers. Natural Resources Canada agrees “Probably no country in the world has as much of its surface area covered by freshwater as does Canada.” With so much water, why then do we insist on buying it in bottles?

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation in 2005, we purchase $653 million dollars worth of bottled water annually. And, it is not as though the water in those bottles comes from some exotic stream fed from pristine mountains unsullied by pollution. No, forty percent of it comes from public water treatment facilities and most of the rest is drawn from wells and aquifers.

In the early days, it was chic to drink one of the many carbonated waters that were hitting the market and virtuous to forego an alcoholic or soft drink in favour of such a healthier alternative. Then still bottled water entered the market with subtle commercials featuring beautiful, healthy people sipping from plastic bottles. Celebrities were photographed clutching their bottles. Bottled water became a symbol for the health or status conscious, despite the cynics who questioned paying such a high price for a product that we can get right from our tap.

When sales of bottled water began to affect their bottom line, the giant soft-drink corporations took notice and adopted the “can’t beat them so join them” philosophy and redirected some of the water used for soft drinks into bottled water distribution. Giant food corporations jumped on the bandwagon, buying up water bottling companies and water sources around the world.

One popular brand of bottled water comes from Fiji and is shipped half way around the world to outlets in Europe and the US. Sadly, one-third of the population in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water and there are fears that the water supply will run dry. “There may be enough water now but the rate of expansion by some of these bottled water companies is a cause for real concern,” said an official with the Fijian Mineral Resources Department.

As bottled water became mainstream, small niche elite brands of bottled water emerged, water bars became trendy and water sommeliers were born. Famous restaurants included numerous brands of bottled water on their menus. Perhaps the ultimate excess is blingH2O that costs $40 a bottle. It is made from glass featuring Swarovski crystals and filled with water from Tennessee.

The popularity of bottled water was unaffected by some embarrassing public relations gaffes, including an ex-Perrier CEO’s comments about the ease of taking water out of the ground and selling it for more than milk, wine or oil. And the case of a “water expert”, who described a glass of water as having a “fresh, sweet lemony aroma” when, in fact, it came from a public restroom.

Of course it is not just status that is driving the sales of bottled water. For many people it is the fear of drinking water contaminated with bacteria, heavy metals, carcinogens, and pharmaceuticals, to name just a few. People assume that water in a bottle must be safe to drink and must be very carefully regulated. But that is not necessarily so. A Toronto Star article in November 2007 suggests that the bottled water industry is one of the least regulated industries in the country.

It makes business sense for water bottlers to ensure that their product is safe, although not necessarily as pure as the hype suggests. Bottled water is taken from the tap or extracted from an underground source then disinfected before bottling. But the water treatment does not necessarily remove all contaminants or dissolved solids. “We tested over a thousand bottles of water, over a hundred brands that are sold in the United States,” says Erik Olson of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We found that some of them had arsenic in them, at high levels. Some had organic chemicals in them, a variety of bacteria, so there were problems with about a third of the brands that we sampled.”

If that isn’t enough, the environmental factors alone may make you think twice about having that bottle of water. Bottled water leaves a wake of waste in its path. Approximately 80% of water bottles are not recycled. According to the Container Recycling Institute, only two out of ten plastic water bottles are recycled in the US. In the UK, 13 billion plastic bottles were sold last year, but only 3 billion were recycled.

What happens to the rest of these bottles? They are dumped in landfills, where they will remain for thousands of years, or are incinerated. Some are left on beaches, in the countryside or on mountainsides. The late Sir Edmund Hillary was horrified by the number of plastic bottles he found on a return visit to Mount Everest.

Some of these bottles turn up in the Eastern Garbage Patch, an area stretching across hundreds of miles of the northern Pacific. When discovered in 1999, researchers counted a million pieces of plastic per square mile. This same plastic breaks down in the ocean and becomes a threat to our wildlife.

The Container Recycling Institute says “The vast majority of bottled water is sold in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles, that are “single serve” sizes and prone to being littered. These plastic bottles are a petroleum product, entailing greenhouse gas production in the manufacturing process.”

It estimates that approximately 18 million barrels of crude oil equivalent were used in 2005 to replace the 2 million tons of plastic bottles that were wasted instead of recycled, in the US alone. This represents enough fuel to run a million cars for a year.

The Polaris Institute provides this description of the PET manufacturing process. “PET is created from terephtalic acid (TPA) and ethylene glycol (EG), both made from crude oil. During the production process, catalysts are used to promote the chemical reaction. Some of these catalysts, which include antimony, titanium, germanium, cobalt, manganese, magnesium and zinc, leach into the water over time causing a potential health risk.”

A fact sheet provided by the Pacific Institute says that it takes 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a single one litre plastic bottle, cap and packaging, that every ton of PET produces 3 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and that the manufacturing process consumes twice as much water as contained in the final bottle of water.

The transportation of the bottles, sometimes from as far away as Tasmania or Fiji, consumes more energy and creates more greenhouse gas emissions. Then add on the cost of refrigeration, recycling or disposal. The Pacific Institute estimates that the total amount of energy required for every bottle of water is equivalent, on average, to filling a plastic bottle 1/4 full of oil. Or as a British study concluded, drinking a bottle of water had the same impact on the environment as driving a car one kilometer.

The irony is that bottled water, the previous “must have” for the health conscious, is having such a detrimental effect on the environment and ultimately on our health. Over $100 billion dollars a year are spent worldwide for something that may not necessarily be purer than our tap water. For a fraction of the cost of bottled water, it is possible to provide the purest water available, and to be kinder to our planet, by installing a drinking water filtration system in our home that is NSF certified to remove all the chemicals, contaminants and bacteria that drove us all to the bottle in the first place.