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Bottled water is drinking water, usually spring water or mineral water, or simply water that has been treated, and is sold in a sealed portable bottle. The worldwide bottled water industry is worth an estimated $22bn annually, and rising, with global consumption more than doubling over five years to 2004, from 98 billion liters, to 154 billion liters (41 billion gallons).
For health reasons, it is preferred by many in areas where the water is considered either polluted or infested. But an additional factor as bottled water becomes increasingly favoured over tap water, is that it may contain less fluoride and/or chlorine, which are often added to tap water during processing. See fluoridation and chlorination.
Drinking bottled water has a significant cost to the environment in comparison to tap water, because of the discarded plastic bottle, and energy costs both of producing the bottled water, and shipping it as cargo.
The most common types of bottled water are the following:
* mineral water - spring water that has a higher mineral content
* purified water - surface or underground water that has been treated for human consumption
* spa water - water taken from a spa
* carbonated water (sparkling) - treated with carbon dioxide to make it bubbly
* spring water - water that was taken from a spring
* well water - water taken from a well
In some countries, not having sufficiently developed water treatment facilities, it is preferable to consume prepackaged water. The large vats (up to a few litres) that such water is sold in may, or may not, be considered bottled water.
Markets
The United States is the largest market for bottled water, at 26 billion liters in 2004. On average, this is one 8-ounce glass per person per day. Italy has the highest average consumption per person, at two 8-ounce glasses per person per day.
Here is data for global markets in 2004, in billions of liters consumed.
* USA 25.8
* Mexico 17.7
* China 11.9
* Brazil 11.6
* Italy 10.7
* Germany 10.3
* France 8.5
* Indonesia 7.4
* Spain 5.5
* India 5.1
* All others 39.9
* Total 154.3
Per person data is shown below, in average number of liters consumed per person.
* Italy 183.6
* Mexico 168.5
* United Arab Emirates 163.5
* Belgium 148.0
* France 141.6
* Spain 136.7
* Germany 124.9
* Lebanon 101.4
* Switzerland 99.6
* Cyprus 92.0
* United States 90.5
* Saudi Arabia 87.8
* Czech Republic 87.1
* Austria 82.1
* Portugal 80.3
* Global Average 24.2
More data and graphs are available externally.
Environmental cost
For thousands of years, people have been making deliberate use of the fact that water flows downhill all by itself. For some hundreds of years, technology has existed to pump water under pressure on a wide scale, enabling it to be stored at altitude, and self-feed under gravity on-demand. This practice has become so wide-spread in the English-speaking world, that the phrase 'on-tap' has become synonymous with'on-demand'.
Putting it into little containers and lugging it around is comparitively inefficient, both in terms of energy and time. This has been known since the dawn of humanity, when we drank from natural pipes and reservoirs known as rivers, lakes, and wells. It is these same natural pipes, which have supported earth's life since the very dawn of time, that are becoming poisoned and polluted by the plastics we discard, and the chemicals and residue from production and shipping of the plastic bottles which contain the bottled water which now enamours so many.
Impact of transportation
Nearly a quarter of all bottles being consumed somewhere in the world have been shipped internationally, by boat, train, and truck.
Impact of materials
Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.
Most bottled water is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a synthetic plastic obtained by refining crude oil. It takes more than 1.5 million barrels of oil a year to manufacture enough bottles for the US alone, and this could instead be used to fuel 100,000 cars.
Eighty-six per cent of such bottles in the US end up as garbage, and when disposed in landfill, are expected to take up to 1000 years to biodegrade. Incineration produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals.
Some 40 per cent of the PET bottles deposited for recycling in the US in 2004 had an additional resource cost, by being shipped to countries as remote as China.
In areas where water is bottled, often water shortages are experienced by the local population due to the bottling effort.
A Coca-Cola bottling plant for Dasani bottled water and other drinks caused shortages for over 50 villages in India. Texas and the Great Lakes region of North America, have experienced similar problems. Farmers, fishers, and others who depend on water may suffer when concentrated water extraction causes water tables to drop quickly.
Alternatives to bottled water
In most countries where bottled water is vogue, tap water is in fact perfectly healthy to drink straight from the tap -- having been treated using chemicals and filtration.
In those places where it is not available or is not reliably treated, the water may be boiled, and/or filtered. Both methods kill a range of harmful lifeforms. Filtration removes many harmful chemicals, and certain types of filtration can even remove fluoride.
Removal of chlorine is not usually necessary, since it is a gas which is extremely volatile and in normal conditions, any residual chlorine evapourates from a standing glass in under 5 minutes.
Even where advanced water filters are not available, and fuel for boiling is scarce, effective, ad-hoc water filters can be made in a few hours from clay by hand, using available materials even in the most resource-starved locations, and without advanced technology or skills [4].
In some areas, water may be obtained from the sky, in the form of rain. This water can frequently be harvested conveniently, for example from the rooftops of buildings, into rainwater tanks. In rural areas the rain is typically very pure and can be safely consumed without additional treatment.
It is an irony worth noting, that many of these sources are the same ones which may dry up or become too polluted to drink in some areas, due to inefficient, pollutive industries like the bottled drink industry. Another irony is that the cost to provide, by 2015, adequate drinking water to half of the 1.1 billion people whose water supply is insecure ($15 bil per year), would be far less than the cost spent on bottled water ($100 bil).
Marketing
In a somewhat ironic twist, many brands are marketed focusing on both the taste and the purity of the water; however, pure water has no taste.
In 2003, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, a Showtime television network program, conducted an informal taste test of bottled water. They found about 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred tap water to bottled waters. They also hired a "water sommelier" to sell $7 bottled water to the patrons in a fancy Californian restaurant. The water sommelier filled each bottle with a garden hose directly from the tap, however, people claimed to know the difference between a bottle of eau du robinet (French for "faucet water") and Agua de Culo (Spanish for "ass water") before they were informed of its source. In the end, the hosts Penn and Teller jokingly offered to sell their brand of water for $150 per bottle.
In 2001, Coca-Cola teamed up with the Olive Garden restaurant to decrease the levels of "tap water incidence." This campaign, distributed in a marketing package called "H2NO," used slogans such as "Just say no to H2O" in order to train restaurant servers to sell drinks, including bottled water, to customers. Coke posted the following web page until media scrutiny and bad press caused them to take it down.
Bottled water in the United States
Bottled water is a somewhat contentious topic in the United States, where the water treatment system is quite sophisticated (so the tap water is drinkable). Some claim that the consumption of the more expensive brands of bottled water is a form of snobbery. In addition, a lot of the bottled water is actually very close to, or in fact is, tap water. Some bottled waters, such as Penta Water even claim to have a new structure of water with associated health benefits, though this is generally regarded as pseudoscience.
What's more, bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times the amount of tap water by volume. That is, maintaining municipal water systems typically costs 0.1-0.2 US cents per gallon, while a ½ liter bottle of water at 99 US cents ends up costing around US$8 a gallon.
Bottled water history in USA
The increased use of bottle water in US recently may have been contributed to several factors. In 1993, Cryptosporidium caused 400,000 people to get sick in Wisconsin. This led to a sensitized media which widely reported another far smaller water infection that happened in Washington, DC in the year 2000. Environmental Protection Agency mandated that tap water should have no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic. A highly reported attempt was made to change the requirement from the previous 10ppb to 50ppb. Coupled with these widely reported incidents is a trend where many Americans are getting health conscious, resulting in bottled water securing its place in their daily lives.
Regulations
In the United States, nutritional information on the water bottle must be precise. Bottled water is regulated by the FDA, who demand suppliers use an "approved source", which the FDA defines as:
means a source of water...that has been inspected and the water sampled, analyzed, and found to be of a safe and sanitary quality according to applicable laws and regulations of state and local government agencies having jurisdiction.
However, the FDA does not define guidelines for which regulations may be considered applicable, nor set requirements for water sources in the absence of applicable laws. Additionally, bottled water suppliers are not required to document the approval of their sources. Water bottlers are permitted to sell contaminated water if, and only if, their labelling notes the water contains "excessive bacteria" or "excessive chemical substances". Water bottlers are additionally not required to test for the presence of E. coli, cryptosporidium, giardia, asbestos, or certain organic compounds such as benzenes. However, most bottled water is in fact heavily tested.
As regards to what constitutes each type of different water, individual states regulate with their own laws precisely what mineral content needs to be in the water for it to be "mineral water". In the US, the minimal mineral content is 250 parts per million. With these figures, certain mineral waters in the US would only qualify as spring water in some other countries.
Ironically, the US Environmental Protection Agency sets more stringent quality standards for tap water than does the FDA for the bottled water. |
