USA Water Filter Blog

The chemical content of our drinking water could be much higher than most people are aware of, according to John McFadden, the executive director for the Tennessee Environmental Council.

“There are about 60,000 chemicals that industries, businesses and residences emit into the environment every day, but we only monitor for about 400 to 500 of them in our drinking water,” McFadden said.

While a lot of these chemicals are only found in trace amounts, tap water contains a chemical soup that people are putting into their bodies, McFadden said.

“We could sample your blood, and find 120 to 150 of the most common chemicals, and a third of those would be carcinogens, and you’re probably getting it from the air you breathe, food you eat, and in the tap water, I believe,” McFadden said.

However, Alan Schwendimann, the director of the Tennessee Division of Water Supply, does not think that the problem is as severe as some make it out to be.

“I don’t know about 60,000, but the 400 to 500 chemicals monitored for are found the most prevalently and have been determined to pose a certain risk to human health,” Schwendimann said.

http://www.mtsusidelines.com/news/quality-of-our-drinking-water-1.2568828

A proposal to tax bottled water was filed Monday in the Florida Senate, re-igniting a water war that has pitted Sen. Evelyn Lynn against bottlers and business groups.

Lynn’s bill (SB 118) is identical to a bill filed last year by Lynn that failed to get a committee hearing.

Given $700 million in budget cuts to water management districts and other cuts to statewide water quality programs, Lynn, R-Ormond Beach, said providing a source of money to pay for mitigating the environmental damage caused by discarded bottles may find more sympathy.

“This would be an effective way to set aside money for environmental cleanup,” Lynn told the News Service of Florida on Monday.

But opposition is expected to be fierce as Lynn battles bottlers like Nestle North American Waters and business groups who rely upon bottled water sales for a growing part of their businesses. She will also face an uphill fight against leaders in her own chamber, who have taken an ardent anti-tax stance

http://www.wctv.tv/news/headlines/Bill_Would_Tax_Bottled_Water_128666263.html

For a natural resource that most of us have access to for minimal cost, water is doing pretty well as a revenue generator. The bottled version of the stuff is currently an $8 billion industry in the United States alone, with Americans drinking about 7 billion gallons of it in 2005. That’s compared to hundreds of billions of gallons of tap water, but for a product that can cost up to 10,000 times more than its municipal counterpart, it’s still an impressive marketshare.

So what’s the appeal? The three most common reasons given by bottled-water drinkers are healthiness, purity and taste. As we’ll get into later on, the first two reasons are somewhat misguided, and the third is open for debate. For a seemingly basic food product, bottled water has generated its share of controversy. Some of it focuses on the federal and state regulations governing the industry, some of it goes deeper into the ecological implications of bottling and transporting billions on billions of gallons of something that flows freely from the tap, and some of it calls into question the labeling practices of bottled-water companies.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/bottled-water.htm

Many people in many developing countries seek out clean drinking water with much difficulty. But developed nations such as the US spend billions of dollars buying bottled water even though their respective countries provide clean drinking water from the tap. What is more is that the plastic bottles that this water comes in create billions of pounds of oil based trash destined to live out a thousand year lifespan in a trash dump.

Bottled water is in many ways an American obsession, with Americans drinking annually 8.6 billion gallons. Not only do they drink vast amounts but Americans are willing to pay 10,000 times the cost of tap water for the privilege of drinking an arguably inferior product. We get the 10,000 times number from the fact that on average bottled water cost $10 per gallon compared to tap water which costs $.0015 per gallon or about a tenth of a penny.

Globally some 53 billion gallons of bottled water are consumed creating a $63 billion dollar industry. One the most peculiar facts is that 40% of this bottled water is actually taken from municipal water sources also known as “tap water”. Another strange element of this puzzle is that far less testing is done on bottled water than on tap water. It turns out that unlike tap water, bottled water isn’t tested for e. coli. More still is the fact that it can be distributed even if it doesn’t meet the quality standards of tap water. Unlike tap water, bottled water isn’t required to produce quality reports or even provide it’s source.

Comically, the bottled water production process is fairly resource intensive. It actually takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce bottled water which is enough oil to fuel 1 million cars for a whole year. Oil isn’t the only necessary resource. Luckily tap water is very cheap because it takes about 3 times the amount of tap water to produce and fill 1 bottle of bottled water.

http://www.onlineeducation.net/bottled_water

The bottled water industry promotes an image of purity, but comprehensive testing by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed, including toxic byproducts of chlorination in Walmart’s Sam’s Choice and Giant Supermarket’s Acadia brands, at levels no different than routinely found in tap water. Several Sam’s Choice samples purchased in California exceeded legal limits for bottled water contaminants in that state. Cancer-causing contaminants in bottled water purchased in 5 states (North Carolina, California, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland) and the District of Columbia substantially exceeded the voluntary standards established by the bottled water industry. Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry is not required to disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,900 times the price of tap water, consumers are clearly led to believe that they are buying a product that has been purified to a level beyond the water that comes out of the garden hose. To the contrary, our tests strongly indicate that the purity of bottled water cannot be trusted.

http://www.ewg.org/reports/BottledWater/Bottled-Water-Quality-Investigation

It’s expensive, wasteful and — contrary to popular belief — not any healthier for you than tap water.

BOTTLED WATER CONTAMINATION: AN OVERVIEW OF NRDC’S AND OTHERS’ SURVEYS

Setting aside the question of whether bottled water is as pure as advertised, is the public’s view that bottled water is safer than tap water correct? Certainly the aggressive marketing by the bottled water industry would lead us to believe so.

NRDC undertook a four-year, detailed investigation to evaluate the quality of bottled water. We reviewed published and unpublished literature and data sources, wrote to and interviewed by phone all 50 states asking for any surveys of bottled water quality they have conducted or were aware of, and interviewed experts from FDA. In addition, through three leading independent laboratories, we conducted “snapshot” testing of more than 1,000 bottles of water sold under 103 brand names.

What NRDC has found is in some cases reassuring and in others genuinely troubling. The results of all testing NRDC conducted is presented in Appendix A; Figure 4 summarizes the results.

The bottled water industry generally has publicly maintained that there are no chemical contaminants in bottled water. For example, as noted in Chapter 2, a widely disseminated fact sheet on bottled water distributed by the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) — the industry’s trade association — states flatly that bottled water contains no chlorine or harmful chemicals. ^[75]

http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/chap3.asp

Findings

1. Most bottled water apparently is of good quality, but some contains contamination; it should not automatically be assumed to be purer or safer than most tap water.

Based on available data and our testing, most bottled water is of good quality, and contamination posing immediate risks to healthy people is rare (see Chapter 3 and theTechnical Report [print report only]). However, blanket reassurances from the bottled water industry that bottled water is totally safe and pure are false.

No one should assume that just because water comes from a bottle that it is necessarily any purer or safer than most tap water. Testing commissioned by NRDC and studies by previous investigators^[3] show that bottled water is sometimes contaminated. NRDC contracted with three leading independent laboratories to do “snapshot” testing (testing one to three times for a subset of contaminants of concern) of bottled water.

http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/chap1.asp

Trace levels of medicines and personal care products have been detected in New York City’s drinking water.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection drew samples from three upstate watersheds between March and December last year and analyzed them for 72 compounds, including antibiotics and prescription drugs.

PICTURES: Toxic tap water? 14 drugs, personal care products found in NYC drinking water

The DEP said the tests detected 14 drugs and personal care products at least once but that none was found at levels that would pose a risk to the city’s 9 million residents.

“For most of these detected compounds, a person would have to drink at least tens of thousands of glasses of water a day to get one effective dose of the substance or to meet a toxicity threshold,” the DEP said in a statement.

Not everyone agreed with the DEP’s assessment of risk.

Although the level for each contaminant detected might be too low to pose a threat to health, “we cannot be assured that the final mix is safe,” Dr. Olga Naidenko, a scientist with the Washington, D.C.-based watchdog organization, told CBS News in an email.

The study follows one done in 2009 that also detected tiny amounts of pharmaceuticals and personal care products, including penicillin and the insect repellent DEET, in the city’s drinking water.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20095389-10391704.html

Everything living thing needs water to survive. Water covers 70 percent of our earth. Less than one percent of that is fresh water for us to use in drinking, cleaning, transportation, heating and cooling, industry, and many other purposes.

The convenience of bottled water has surely hit all of us as we run out the door and grab a bottle on our way to the gym, ball game, soccer practice, or just to run an errand. Many people buy bottled water for the convenience alone, while others think that water out of bottles with pictures of mountain streams, and cool rivers must surely be more pure than their tap water. Actually, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strictly regulates the codes and standards on our tap water, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates bottled water. Interestingly, many bottled water distributers actually fill plastic bottles with their tap water, which is perfectly legal. For example, both Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani bottled waters are essentially bottles filled with tap water from their distribution plants.

http://www.leavenworthtimes.com/opinions/x868580281/The-Green-Space-The-differences-between-bottled-and-tap-water

http://www.leavenworthtimes.com/opinions/x868580281/The-Green-Space-The-differences-between-bottled-and-tap-water