The Water Project reports that, “Every year over $100 Billion dollars is spent on bottled water world-wide.” That is a whole lot of water! Why would Americans spend any money on water in a bottle when we can get it right through our facet through the city water, or our wells? There has been an ongoing debate amongst people in our nation, which is better for you tap or bottled water. I would like to discuss some pros and cons relating to Americans’ drinking bottled water, as well as the pros from drinking regular tap or well water.
The rational reason people choose to drink bottled water is the convenience factor. It is available just about anywhere you go, the supermarket, convenience stores, place of employment, parks, schools’ and even our rest stops on the interstate. We tend to grab the bottle of water feeling that we’ve made a healthier decision than its soda counterpart right next to it. “It’s the argument that companies like Coca-Cola make to defend their sale of bottled water, which comes not from some fancy spring somewhere, but from a local municipal water supply. You know, the same thing you’ve got in your home — the tap. (Grohol PSYD)”. The real question to this is how healthy is it really?
Everywhere you look there will be a bottle of water, in our cubicles at work, the cup holder on our exercise machine, the side pockets of our backpacks, every sports event etc, and it’s amazing how also in most of these places you will find half emptied bottles all over the ground. If you look in a random pick of five cars in America you are bound to find an empty bottle lying around somewhere in the back seat.
Marketing water didn’t take much work. People already instinctively know that water is better for you verses’ a soft drink. In fact, according to Fishman, “The clear bottle allows us to see the water - how clean and refreshing it looks on the shelf. Americans have never wanted water in cans, which suggest a tiny aftertaste before you take a sip. The plastic bottle, in fact, did for water what the pop-top can had done for soda: It turned water into an anywhere, anytime beverage, at just the moment when we decided we wanted a beverage, everywhere, all the time.” Compared to soda, establishments only set aside 15% for marketing the bottle of water. The company is saving millions of dollars a year in advertising cost compared to soda, by allowing the clear, refreshing look that a bottle of water gives us.
Both Coke and Pepsi companies’ bottles water with the brand name Dasani and Aquafina draws water from municipal sources (city pipes) and then ships it all across our nation to sell them. Since Coke and Pepsis’ water comes straight from the tap water in the city they don’t have all the cost like Poland Spring which has “to spend money collecting data from monitoring wells, protecting the virginality of their sources, or battling community opponents.(Royte)” Since these companies aren’t bottling their water in every city let alone every state they are required to ship all over our country which has a huge impact on our environmental footprint. Above all else the amount of plastic being used is absurd. According to Global View Points, “46,000 pieces of plastic litter floats around in every square mile of ocean. Fifty or sixty years ago there was no plastic out there.” Our nation has become numb to the amount of pollution we are causing the world with each bottle of plastic we use, but it is a fact that just cannot be ignored anymore.
Is bottled water really healthier than tap water? Marketers would have us believe that it is much healthier. Bottled water is not regulated like normal tap city water. Many studies have been done on bottled water and they all come back about the same. Here is one I like best – “Altogether, the analyses conducted by the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory of these 10 brands of bottled water revealed a wide range of pollutants, including not only disinfection byproducts, but also common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals (Tylenol); heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes; fertilizer residue (nitrate and ammonia); and a broad range of other, tentatively identified industrial chemicals used as solvents, plasticizers, viscosity decreasing agents, and propellants.” Wow there is a great deal that can be found in bottled water. How come we don’t know this information commonly? We drink bottled water because we are led to believe that it is cleaner, but “the federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water (Blomenfeld)”. Enterprises believe that the clear clean looking water in the bottle will speak for itself, along with their labels displaying mountains or streams, while in fact they are pumped with virtually the same materials as an oil rig.
One essential mineral to our diet is magnesium. With the obesity sky rocketing out of control many need to understand that tap water has magnesium which according to Organic Facts, “Magnesium is needed to keep muscle and nerve functioning normal and heart beat rhythmic. It also helps to support a healthy immune system, and keeps bones strong. Magnesium also helps to regulate blood sugar levels, thereby promoting normal blood pressure and supports energy metabolism and protein synthesis. Magnesium has a positive effect on treatment of disorders such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes.” Much of Americans have one or more of these disorders, however problems associated with weight, requires us to take another look at the benefits of tap water. “While most filtered and bottled waters are free of cancer-causing contaminants, they provide little or no magnesium (Davis MD).” As a matter-of-fact the harder the water the more magnesium and other minerals you will get. According to Helminstein MD, “ Hard water is any water containing an appreciable quantity of dissolved minerals. Soft water is treated water in which the only cation (positively charged ion) is sodium.” Bottled water is considered the softest water the average person is likely to get.
There is another reason to drink tap water that we all know but decide to ignore and that is, what is it doing to our environment? We all know that our landfills are being flooded with plastics yet we have grown immune to this element. “Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere”, according to the Container Recycling Institute.” Wow, above and beyond our garbage, or the machinery to package and ship our “bottled water” we do serious damage in just the making of the bottle. These are phenomical statistics.
We tend to think that we are paying for conveinence when we purchase something easy to get ranging from paper towels to fast food meals, but even with fast food you know its pretty cheap for the amount of food you are given. However with bottled water you are paying outlandish prices for conveinence. Blumenfeld and Leal said it best, “Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian (bottled water brand), a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is. Why would anyone pay that much money for one bottle of water when compared to tap water? The corporations have really done a fantastic job brainwashing us to buy such a product.
Bottled water is big business due to the low marketing prices, and the American people thinking its better for you and enjoying the conveinence of it. However, “Estimates variously place worldwide bottled water sales at between $50 and $100 billion each year, with the market expanding at the startling annual rate of 7 percent (Baskind).” There are not many commercials on our televisions promoting bottled water, yet everyone knows about it, and most purchase the merchandise frequently.
I have conducted my own research poll of 25 people. Of the 25 all have admitted to buying bottled water at least once a week. Twenty of the participants confirm that they do not drink tap water at all because they may get sick, but prefer bottled water because they know its safe. Two people of the 20 admitted to even using bottled water for cooking. They refuse to subject their family to the harmful effects that tap water may have. After I questioned them I then told them about the regulations that tap water providers have to adhere to verses bottled and all the things that are in bottled water verses tap. However I only swayed two of the participants the rest stand true to their beliefs that bottled is better for you and also that it tastes better.
ABC News show 20/20 features John Stossel, he conducted his own experimental test to see if people really thought it tasted different or if it was just the hype of the advertisements, or their own belief that it had to taste better? He conducted a study of 20 participants located in New York City and used five common brands of bottled water and of course tap water. Stossel states, “We asked people to rate the waters as bad, average or great. Lots of people said one of the waters was particularly bad. Was that the tap water? No. Tap water did pretty well. Even people who said they don't like it, liked it on the blind test.” Maybe everyone that uses the excuse “it tastes better” should try this study in their own home with their own family and see what they come up with.
In conclusion I have come to realize there really aren’t any pros to drinking bottled water at all for every lame man that buys it. The only positive for drinking bottled water is for the enterprise that is selling it due to the cheap to almost nothing in advertising costs that they incur, since the clear liquid in the clear bottle pretty much sells itself. There are no positives in relation to our health with a bottle of water. However tap water carries many essential minerals including magnesium that our bodies need every day. A person can live for weeks on water alone, but we can’t live more than a couple days without it. Also, since magnesium helps boost the metabolism if you drink regular tap or well water every day and cut out some of the carbonated drinks you are destined to lose weight if you are heavy-set.
Where taste is concerned I have conducted my own taste test upon myself, and when blind-folded I felt more pressure to get the taste right. It turns out that when I tried the bottled water I was looking for the chlorine taste that it carries verse tap that doesn’t have much of that type of taste at all. Once in a blue moon I will buy a bottle of water and carry it around for days, continuing to fill it up with regular tap water. That is the way I cut out the convenience factor in my own life. The only other time I purchase bottled water is when we are about to go camping and we will take with us several gallons. Otherwise I live off of tap and am very healthy myself.
So next time you think you need to grab a case of bottled water at the grocery store, just know that you are doing it well informed. Try to save the bottled water for occasions that you may need it, for example camping, or sporting events. Again I have to stress lets save our health and the environment together.
Works Cited
Baskind, Chris. "5 Reasons not to drink bottled water." Mother Nature Network. Ed. Shea Gunther. Mother nature network, 15 Mar. 2010. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/stories/5-reasons-not-to-drink-bottled-water>.
Blomenfeld, Jared, and Susan Leal. "The real cost of bottled water." Common Dreams. Org. San Francisco Chronicle , 18 Feb. 2007. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0218-05.htm>.
"Bottled Water - Making a Clear Choice." The Water Project. N.p., 2011. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://thewaterproject.org/bottled_water.asp?gclid=CPq3rsWj46oCFRAE2godB3Az8A>.
Chenes, Elizabeth D., ed. Garbage and Recycling. Farmington Hills: Christine Nasso, 2011. 132. Print.
Davis MD, William. "Is your botteled water killing you?." Life Extension. N.p., Feb. 2007. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2007/feb2007_report_water_01.htm>.
Fishman, Charles. "Message in a Bottle." Fast Compay. Ed. Robert Safian. N.p., July. Web. 27 Sept. 2011. <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html?page=0%2C0>.
Grohol, John M. "The Psychology of Bottled Water." Psych Central. Ed. John M. Grohol. N.p., 2011. Web. 26 Sept. 2011. <http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2007/07/27/the-psychology-of-bottled-water/>.
"Health benefits of Magnesium." Organic Facts. Rural Tech Services, 2011. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/minerals/health-benefits-of-magnesium.html>.
Helminstein MD, Anne M. "Chemistry of hard and soft water." Chemistry. Water Works, n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2011.
Naidenko, Olga. "Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 pollutants." Environmental Working Group. N.p., Oct. 2008. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.ewg.org/reports/BottledWater/Bottled-Water-Quality-Investigation>.
Royte, Elizabeth. Bottlemaia. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. 38-39. Print.
Stossel, John. "Is bottled water better than tap?." ABC News 20/20. ABC News, 6 May 2005. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=728070&page=1>.
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