ExamineHealth

Americans drank 8.7 billion gallons of bottled water in 2008, totaling sales of $11.2 billion dollars...

(This is still only half the amount of carbonated soft drinks, and barely ahead of beer and milk.  However, that's a lot of water - and a lot of bottles.)

It takes 17 million barrels of oil (that's enough to fuel 1 million cars for a year) to produce a year's worth of water bottles...

Worse, 86% of those water bottles are thrown into landfills, not recycled... 

Is it not clear that we need to break ourselves of the bottled water habit?  In a previous article I discussed the quality of bottled water VS filtered tap water, so I am not getting into that here.  Today I'd like to talk about water bottles themselves.  Are they inherently bad?  Or is it just their disposable nature that makes them so damaging to the environment?  Can we reduce the carbon footprint of these bottles by reusing them?  And is that safe?

Most developed countries have mastered safe drinking water.  The disinfecting practices on our drinking water is a huge victory over water borne illnesses like typhoid fever and cholera, and countries who treat their water suffer from extremely low numbers of illness and death due to water contamination.  The breakthrough in the disinfectant process was the treatment of the water with chlorine.  Chlorine kills many harmful water-borne contaminates, parasites and disease-causing pathogens that would otherwise make us sick.  The EPA requires a concentration of 0.2 ppm (parts per million) of chlorine in all tap water in the United States, with the average being closer to 4 ppm.

Of course there is a price to pay for disinfecting our water, chlorine is responsible for many harmful affects.  It's same harsh nature that allows it to kill the bad things in our water has the same effect on our hair and skin.  Attacking our cells like the poison that it is.  More importantly, it binds to organic material in the water to create something called disinfection byproducts (DBP).  These byproducts have been linked to birth defects and cancer and count in the thousands of different types of compounds.  Chloroform is a known toxin that is a trihalomethane (THM), a type of DBP that is linked to liver and kidney cancer, as well as miscarriages and birth defects.  Now, water treatment professionals are constantly detecting, tracking and monitoring these DBP's in our water supply and looking for ways to reduce them.  However, the disinfecting of the water itself with chlorine far outweighs the dangers of DBP's.  The fact is that chlorine is here to stay.

Bottled water is the fasted growing drink choice in the United States, spending billions of dollars per year on it (Beverage Marketing Corporation, 2004).  Some people prefer the taste, while others think it is safer than drinking out of the tap.  All drinking water (tap and bottled) can be expected to contain at least a small amount of contaminates.  This does not necessarily mean it is a health risk.  For example, magnesium and calcium give water a distinctive flavor and are essential to the body.