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The Cincinnati Beacon
The Bottled Water Lie: Aquafina is just tap water
Monday, August 06, 2007
Posted by Justin Jeffre
It’s widely known there are virtually no regulations on bottled water, but when you think about paying 7,000 times more for a product than you need to and that it causes so much pollution, it’s clear we should change our behavior. Save your money and the environment by saving your bottle and using your tap.
After reading Michael Earl Patton’s recent article about “Too Much Estrogen” in our water and thinking about Pepsi’s recent admission, it might be time to precipitate more discussion about our water.
While it is true that there are some chemicals in our water, bottled water isn’t necessarily cleaner. Sometimes it’s worse and at least our tap water is regulated and monitored. I think we can all agree that clean, affordable water should be a priority for any society and we should pay more attention to the state of our vital resources.
The bottled water industry has spent millions of dollars trying to make people think that their bottled tap water is cleaner and taste better than the water we get from our taps. That’s often not the case at all.
This industry doesn’t just cause a lot of pollution, but they have also tainted our perception of municipal water. Our water isn’t perfect and should be improved, but it is clean enough that you could probably put it in a bottle with a nice label and sell it for a large profit. Tap’s Blue Ribbon anyone?
You can find out more about this issue here. Here’s an excerpt from http://www.democracynow.org:
The soft drink giant Pepsi has been forced to make an embarrassing admission – its best-selling Aquafina bottled water is nothing more than tap water. Last week Pepsi agreed to change the labels of Aquafina to indicate that the water comes from a public water source. Pepsi agreed to change its label under pressure from the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International which has been leading an increasingly successful campaign against bottled water.
In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom recently banned city departments from using city money to buy any kind of bottled water. In New York, local residents are being urged to drink tap water. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has passed a resolution that highlighted the importance of municipal water and called for more scrutiny of the impact of bottled water on city waste.
The environmental impact of the country’s obsession with bottled water has been staggering. Each day an estimated 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away. Most are not recycled. The Pacific Institute has estimated 20 million barrels of oil are used each year to make the plastic for water bottles.
Economically it makes sense to stop buying bottled water as well. The Arizona Daily Star recently examined the cost difference between bottled water and water from the city’s municipal supply. A half liter of Pepsi’s Aquafina at a Tucson convenience store costs one dollar and thirty nine cents. The bottle contains purified water from the Tucson water supply. From the tap, you can pour over six point four gallons for a penny. That makes the bottled stuff about 7,000 times more expensive even though Aquafina is using the same source of water.
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