Bottled water has become an indispensable prop in our lives and culture. It starts the day in lunch boxes, goes to every meeting, lecture hall and soccer match. Thirty years ago it barely existed as a business. Last year we spent more on Poland Spring , Fiji water, Evian, Aquafina and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets - $15 billion. But are the marketing claims of bottled water accurate? Green Acre Radio’s Martha Baskin lets the genie out of the bottle.
Think bottled water is cleaner, healthier and safer than tap? New reports released to Congress last week evaluate gaps in government regulation of the bottled water industry. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization, urges Americans to make bottled water “a distant second choice” to filtered tap water. The group says bottled water manufacturers don’t disclose enough information about the sources of their water -- this after they surveyed the labels and websites of nearly 200 bottled water products.
The Food and Drug Administration regulates bottled water because it’s considered a food product, whereas the environmental protection agency oversees municipal water. Nneka Leiba with the Environmental Working Group, says, “We just feel that the FDA is enjoying a regulatory holiday as compared to the EPA.” The EPA requires municipalities to release a consumer confidence report annually, says Leiba, to disclose the source of the water as well as contaminants found and tested for. “And then they have to disclose where these contaminants could have come from and they have all these additional requirements they’re required to disclose. The FDA just doesn’t require any of this at all."
Federal law also requires municipal water suppliers to identify their water sources. In Seattle, residents are informed that their tap water comes from the Cedar and Told River watersheds. By comparison, says the Environmental Working Group, the FDA doesn’t require bottled water companies to name the specific source of their water. Instead they can provide generic terms such as "artesian" or "spring" waters, water collection methods, or treatment methods such as "purified." Twenty-five to 40 percent of bottled water the environmental working group tested, says Leiba, is simply tap water. “In some cases they are just tap water and in some cases they are tap water that has been treated after it's been collected from the tap,” Leiba says.
The bottled water industry’s trade group, the International Bottled Water Association, disputes that the FDA’s regulation process is not as rigorous as the EPA’s. Spokesman Tom Laurie says, “Some of our member companies test the water up to 68 times a day and it's spring water which only requires ozonation to be certified/purified. Purified water comes from tap water that goes through five different barriers of disinfectant removing the chlorine, the aluminum sulfate. There’s a lot of things in tap water that some consumers would rather not have in their personal drinking water.”
City of Seattle water lab director Wylie Harper says water from the Cedar River watershed, which is closed to industry, roads and development, is some of the best in the country. “You have some folks making the argument and I think it's legitimate that when you’re getting drinking water from your tap in a public system there’s a lot of assurance that it’s been monitored, treated and maintained to really rigid standards that the EPA holds their systems to.”
Between 25 and 40 percent of bottled water is tap water, according to both the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and Think Outside the Bottle Campaign after EWG surveyed almost 200 brands. Two weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office, along with EWG, urged Congress to make sure that bottled water companies disclose the source of their water. To do that Congress would have to increase funding for FDA. As is, their inspection of bottled water plants is a low priority.
The fact that more than a quarter of bottled water is repackaged tap water doesn’t sit well with the "Think Outside the Bottle" campaign. The four-year-old campaign galvanizes support for public water systems. “Nestle PureLlife, Pepsi’s Aquafina, and Coke’s Dasani are all basically bottled tap water," says Kristin Urquiza, the director of the campaign. "In 2007, because of the pressure of the campaign, we were able to move Pepsi to agree to provide more information about the source of the water they were using by spelling out that the water in the bottle was coming from a public water source. The same thing happened at the end of last year with Nestlé’s pure life.”
Urquiza says misleading marketing has caused the bottled water industry to boom by undermining people’s confidence in the very same water used by industry. "At the same time spending for public water infrastructure has shrunk from 78 percent in 1978 to just 3 percent today. The Think Outside the Bottle campaign is shifting the public climate to help rebuild this political will to promote, to protect and ensure public funding for our public water systems." The reports submitted to Congress are the first step in consistent federal regulation of all water, public and bottled.
Green Acre Radio is brought to you with support from the human links foundation and the Russell family foundation. Engineering by Moe Provenchar. From the studios of Jack Straw productions and KBCS
