Don’t Buy Bottled Water

by Arnie Alpert*

At the coffee shop across Main Street from our office, you can buy a bottle of water from Fiji, an island in the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away. The bottle is attractively designed, and boasts “the taste of paradise.” At $1.25 for 500 milli-liters (or 16.9 oz.), Fiji water costs $9.47 a gallon.

Contrast that with water from the tap. According to the Department of Environmental Services, a typical tap-water consuming household in New Hampshire pays $350 a year for 275 gallons a day. That comes to a little over a third of a cent per gallon.

Why would anyone pay 2700 times as much to drink water that – let’s be honest here – can’t be distinguished from tap water by any but the most discerning drinkers? Fiji’s label says its origin is “rainfall, which over decades filters into an aquifer deep beneath volcanic highlands and pristine tropical forests on the main island of Viti Levu in Fiji. Separated by over 1,500 miles of the open Pacific from the nearest continent, this virgin ecosystem protects one of the purest waters in the world.”

The tap says nothing.

Are consumers really that gullible? We must be; sales of bottled water in the United States have been rising by 9% a year for the past decade.

And the cost is more than just the price tag on the bottle. Think of how much petroleum it takes to ship water from Fiji to New Hampshire. Or, think of how much petroleum is used shipping New Hampshire’s “Castle Springs” water to the dozens of states and throughout the Caribbean where it is sold? How many of the millions of plastic bottles are tossed out of car windows, fed to incinerators, or piled up in landfills?

The biggest promoters of bottled water are the world biggest food conglomerates: Nestle, which owns Poland Springs, Perrier, and other brands of “spring water;” Coca Cola, which markets Dasani; and Pepsi, which sells Aquafina. It is worth noting that Dasani and Aquafina have their origins in municipal tap water.

Claims that bottled water is healthier than municipal tap water should be taken with skepticism. “Studies have shown,” writes Tony Clark in Inside the Bottle: An Exposé of the Bottled Water Industry, “ that neither spring nor purified bottle water is necessarily safer than water that comes out of the municipal tap in many North American communities. What’s more, the regulation of safety conditions for municipal tap water is often much more strict than it is for bottled water in many jurisdictions of the U.S and Canada.”

Moreover, the claim that a healthy person should drink 8 glasses of water each day is not based on science, concluded Dr. Heinz Valtin, a kidney specialist at Dartmouth Medical School in 2002. But the image of the healthy, young person with a plastic bottle of brand-name water has fixed itself in mass consciousness, to the benefit of the bottled water industry.

By bottling water and selling it, companies like Pepsi, Coke, and Nestle are taking something that belongs to everyone – or to no one – and turning into a highly profitable commodity. It is one thing to drink bottled water when safe tap water is unavailable. It is another thing entirely to shell out big bucks for bottled water when the alternative is as easy as turning a tap.

What You Can Do:

Stop buying bottled water. Instead, use your own water bottle (or purchase a Trade Matters Water for Life, Not for Profit bottle at the AFSC store) to drink tap water.
Talk to your town officials about adopting ordinances which restrict the ability of private companies to withdraw local water and bottle it for sale.

*Arnie Alpert, New Hampshire coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, is a member of the Monitor's board of contributors.