Crisp. Clean. Pure.

Bottled water companies are smart. In their quest for luring consumers to their product, they use scintillating words meant to entice the parched palette. And it seems to be working.

Even though most of us can get our water for free straight from the tap, even though 70 percent of the Earth is covered by water, the bottled water industry rakes in $35 billion in annual worldwide sales as consumers buy into claims of bottled water being safer, cleaner and more vitamin-enhanced than tap water.

But according to a number of studies done on both bottled water and tap water, claims of purity couldn’t be further from the truth.

For starters, bottled water is regulated by the FDA, whose safety requirements are far more lax than those of the EPA, the body that regulates tap water. The reason for the discrepancy in oversight is due to bottled water being considered a food product, as it’s bottled using food-grade equipment and shipped over state lines (if it’s not shipped over state lines, it’s subject to state health standards, which vary from state to state). Furthermore, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the FDA is allowed to interpret the EPA’s standards selectively, and implement safety standards only as it sees fit.

The NRDC admits that the FDA’s lax standards aren’t so bad that they’d compromise a healthy person, but they do say that the significant holes are large enough for anyone—the immune deficient, in particular—to be skeptical of claims that bottled water is cleaner than tap water.

Some of these “significant holes” in the FDA’s standards is their lack of requirements. For instance, the NRDC found that there are no safety standards that prohibit bottling plants from being in direct proximity to industrial plants, dumps or underground storage tanks. If water were to be contaminated due to a careless bottler, there is no procedure implemented that would reject a contaminated bottle. And even if there were, “none of the bottled water test results have to be made public,” according to NRDC’s Erik Olson in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Conversely, tap water is tested approximately 100 times a month for bacterium like fecal coliform. Positive or not, the test results must be made public.

Because the FDA doesn’t have to report its findings, groups like the NRDC and others like them thought they’d do some tests of their own.

One NRDC study examined 38 different brands of water bottled in California. Among their findings, two samples contained arsenic, six contained chlorine chemical by-products and another six contained toluene, a toxic agent found in paint thinners, printing ink, disinfectants and adhesives!

A similar study was commissioned by researchers out of Case Western Reserve University and Ohio State, who compared Cleveland’s tap water to 57 samples of bottled water. They found that while most of the bottled water samples were cleaner, 15 samples had higher bacteria counts than city water.

The point of all this is to be skeptical of bottled water and their claims of purity. Researchers say the evidence of bottled water contamination is still considered safe enough to drink, but the lax oversight and claims of purity certainly gives one pause before coughing up another $1.50.

Source:
Organic Consumers