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« Mr. Yuk: He's in my house, is he in yours? | Main | Fire up yer ovens, people, it's a recipe contest »
Buyer beware: What's in your bottled water?
By Olga Naidenko, PhD and Nneka Leiba, MPH
If I want healthy, tasty, clean drinking water, and I want it today, tomorrow, and for the future, where do I turn? The bottled water industry has a ready-made answer - buy our bottled waters that come in hundreds of brands and with just as many claims that cover everything from unearthly purity to miraculous cures.
Shoppers spend their hard-earned money to purchase bottled water in part because they distrust the quality of their tap water. And while drinking pure water is a healthy choice, bottled water is not the answer. A new EWG study shows that bottled water is polluted with a range of contaminants, including many of the same chemical pollutants typical in municipal tap water supplies. Laboratory tests - conducted for EWG at one of the country's leading water quality laboratories - found that ten popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in nine states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants altogether, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand.
Two of ten brands tested, Walmart's and Giant's store brands, bore the chemical signature of standard municipal water treatment -- a cocktail of chlorine disinfection byproducts at concentrations that exceeded legal limits and industry-sponsored voluntary safety standards. Four brands were also contaminated with bacteria. These results show that consumers should have no confidence in the purity of the bottled water they buy. If the water at the source is contaminated, so will be the water in the bottle. And bottled water production itself can contribute additional chemical pollutants.
So how do we ensure the supply of good quality drinking water for the future? Federal, state, and local policymakers must strengthen protections for rivers, streams, and groundwater that serve as America's drinking water sources. And the environmental impacts associated with bottled water production and distribution aggravate the nation's water quality challenges rather than help solving them. Not to mention the bottle water industry's contribution to plastic pollution, one of the biggest environmental problems facing the world today. Only one-fifth of the bottles produced by the industry are recycled.
What can consumers do:
- Drink filtered tap water
A carbon filter at the tap or in a pitcher removes many of the contaminants found in public tap water supplies. EWG compared the prices and capacities of seven faucet-mounted and pitcher filters. The prices ranged from $19.99 to $39.99 with capacities ranging from 40 gallons to 100 gallons, resulting in a manageable cost of $0.31 per gallon - much cheaper than the typical cost of $3.89 per gallon of bottled water. - For additional safety, consider a whole-house carbon filter
Installing a whole-house carbon filter will strip out chemicals not only from drinking water, but also from water used in the shower, clothes washers and dishwashers where they can volatilize into the air for families to breathe in. We compared five different units and documented prices in the range between $64.99 to $795 per unit, with life spans between 3 and 36 months. This leads to an estimated cost of $1.00/day or $0.25/day per person for a four-person household. This simple, common-sense investment will go a long way in protecting the health of the entire family, all the time. - Forgo the plastic bottles
Plastic additives, many of which have not been fully assessed for safety, can migrate from the plastic packaging into bottled water. EWG recommends that consumers use a stainless steel bottle filled with filtered tap water to avoid these potentially harmful contaminants.
All Americans deserve to have access to good quality drinking water, with full disclosure of its sources, treatment, and potential presence of chemical contaminants. Otherwise, marketing the image of purity and not delivering on the promise leaves bottled water drinkers at risk.
That "cocktail" of chlorine that you reference is actually what makes drinking water safe to drink in the Western world. Jersey City started using it 100 years ago and its caught on to nearly every municipality in the U.S. because it's so safe and effective. If it were dangerous, then we'd see more chlorine-related stories, but the truth is the danger is in NOT using it and exposing yourself to the risk of cholera and other water-born diseases. Drinking from the tap is also much, much more environmentally friendly.
We completely agree that water disinfection provides great public health benefits. However, toxic disinfection byproducts are formed during treatment when disinfectants such as chlorine react with organic matter and urban and agricultural contaminants in the source water. By protecting the purity of our source waters we can decrease levels of these byproducts. And, of course, simple tap filter or whole-house filter will remove these chemicals and provide good quality water for the entire family at a very manageable cost.
How about water that says on the bottle “Natural Alpine Spring Water” and it gives us the actual source, the location and the name of the source??
Isn’t this water safer than tap water?
How about high end mineral water?
Also, I heard on the news that one of the cancer-causing chemicals found in those bottled water samples mentioned in this article is also found in tap water. Will a regular filter remove such chemicals from the water, or does it only remove the chlorine and particles?
Your study on Bottle Water is coming under fire for bad research methodologies. I hope you will be able to clear all this up or it could seriously damage your organizations credibility.
Link to the news story
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/yale-scientist-refutes-study-bottled/story.aspx?guid=%7B8FFAF481-233B-4DD8-BA31-D3BC1C081722%7D&dist=hppr
In response to the recent comments: EWG research highlighted the diversity in the bottled water market – while some bottled water producers clearly provide high quality products, the purity and consistent quality of other bottled waters remains in question. And when it comes to cancer-causing disinfection byproducts in drinking water, whether tap or bottled, a tap filter or a pitcher filter can help with removal of both disinfectants (such as chlorine) and disinfection byproducts – at a significantly smaller cost compared to the price of bottled water.
For the sake of brevity, the full news story from the post by Mr. Moore above was not included; instead, a web-link to the story on Market Watch is provided. To see EWG response to the statements from the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), “IBWA Claims Tests Show No Contaminants, But Test Results Nowhere to Be Found,” go to link http://www.ewg.org/node/27253
I still don’t see a clear answer to the question:
Is there spring or mineral bottled-water that is proven to be cleaner than filtered tap-water??
If the answer is “YES”, then how is the consumer to recognize those “safe products”?
Again, if it says on the bottle “Natural Alpine Spring Water” and it gives us the actual source, the location and the name of the source – is this grounds to consider the product “safe”?
We have a faucet that won't allow a faucet-mounted filter. Anyone know if Brita filters contain BPA? We've had ours since the late 1990s.
We live in Pa. A reputable doctor told me that our water is very high in heavy metals and the incidence of bladder cancer is high in this part of the country. She told me that carbon filters will NOT remove these toxins. So, I went back to bottled water. Anyone know of a website where you can find what's REALLY in your local water? The water company makes everything look safe. You don't know who to trust.
Kelly, EWG has created a tap water database where you can look up your local water quality. It's here: http://www.ewg.org/tapwater/yourwater/
Hope that helps!