Now Bottled Water Can’t Be Trusted

After years of convincing the American public that tap water wasn’t the safest to drink and bottled water was the way to go, we now have to be wary of bottled water.  Yes, the fancy bottle of H2O from the French Alps is most likely from a stream around the way.

Interestingly enough, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has little authority to regulate bottled water.  But it is a liquid intended for consumption.  According to a congressional report by the General Accounting Office (GAO),

Over the past decade, the per capita consumption of bottled water in the United States has more than doubled—from 13.4 gallons per person in 1997 to 29.3 gallons per person in 2007. With this increase have come several concerns, raised by public interest groups in recent years, over bottled water’s quality and safety. For example, water quality testing conducted by some of these and other groups has shown that bottled water is not necessarily cleaner than tap water. Furthermore, bottled water, like tap water, has been found in some cases to have contamination levels in excess of water quality standards used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for public water systems and adopted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for bottled water. In addition to the concerns about the quality and safety of bottled water, consumer groups have also questioned whether consumers are adequately informed about the source of bottled water, how it is treated, and its quality.

An Environmental Working Group report concluded similar findings based on an 18-month survey and review of bottled water:

• Just two of the 188 bottled water companies surveyed provided consumers with information on the source of their water, the manner in which it was treated, and any contaminants present.
• Even when water is treated at municipal facilities and then bottled, there still may be questions about contaminants such as pharmaceuticals that may be present in the treated water.
• An “estimated 25% of bottled water brands that rely on tap water are drawing from supplies that collectively contain at least 260 pollutants.”

So what’s a bottled water drinker to do? You could wait for Congress to pass legislation to fix the problem, or…according to the trade association representing the bottled water industry:

If a consumer is interested about what is in their bottled water, they have multiple methods of obtaining it, e.g., from the company website, contacting the company directly, researching state websites which post the information or IBWA’s website. If they are not satisfied with the response or the information provided, they have many choices among bottled water brands.

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