Bottled water is healthy water, right? That’s how marketers like you to see it, at least. Their labels invoke images of pristine springs and magnificent mountain streams, and their advertisements are filled with emphasis on the “purity,” “freshness” and “cleanliness” of the water. Aquafina’s slogan reads: “Make your body happy … So pure, we promise nothing.” In actuality, bottled water is just water. Healthy compared with the Coke next to it in the vending machine maybe, but just water.
This has not stopped people from buying it, though –– and buying a lot of it. Last year, Americans spent $15 billion on bottled water, and worldwide sales are estimated to be as much as $100 billion. Bottled water is a big business, but at what value?
A typical 20-ounce bottle of water bought from a vending machine usually costs $1, about five cents per ounce. Compared with gas at about $3 a gallon, the bottle of water costs more than twice as much per ounce, and up to 10,000 times as much as tap water! No wonder corporations are jumping in to commoditize what is fast becoming humanity’s most precious resource.
Bottled water may be expensive, but what about the health aspects? This industry would like you to think your money well spent on a wonderful, heavenly clean, mountain fresh, healthy product. But the reality is that bottled water is not necessarily any more pure or safe than tap water. Ironically, the federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water. In fact, the nation’s top two selling bottled waters, Aquafina and Dasani, are just purified municipal water — repackaged tap water.
Two brands that were sold as “pure glacier water” and “spring water” actually came from a public water supply and a contaminated well. How is that for more than twice the cost of gasoline? Testing commissioned by the National Resources Defense Council and studies by previous investigators show that even bottled water itself is sometimes contaminated. This industry merely sells through image marketing and deception, and many of us fall for the song of this siren. We like to believe that bottled water is healthier and cleaner, but it really is just not so.
Not only does this water fall appallingly short of such commonly held beliefs, but it brings heavy environmental consequences as well. About 1.5 million barrels of oil — enough to run 100,000 cars for a whole year — are used to make plastic water bottles, while transporting these bottles burns even more oil.
That doesn’t bode well with ever-increasing alarm about global warming, not to mention unnecessarily uses up a limited resource and increases pollution. Also, nearly 90 percent of water bottles are not recycled. Those that do not make it to the recycling or garbage cans tend to find their way to the oceans, creating great hazards to marine life. With an almost eternal decay rate, most of the plastics ever produced still exist, all around us.
The next time you feel thirsty, forgo the bottle for the tap. Think your tap water tastes awful? Inexpensive filters will easily bring most tap water that familiar fresh taste. What about convenience? You can just bring along a reusable bottle or a thermos. With its exorbitant price, with its damaging environmental impact, with the facts that one billion people today are without a reliable water source and 3,000 children die a day from diseases caused by tainted water, and with such an easy substitute of tap water, our massive consumption of bottled water seems more than wasteful, perhaps cavalier. You have the choice.
— Angela Dai is a Dos Pueblos High senior and contributor to Kids Speaking Up, a local group working to educate youth on social, national and political issues and inspire them to write.
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