Bottled Water Quality vs Municipal Drinking Water Quality Essay

Do you ever think bottled water is safer than tap water? You would be wrong. According to "Bottled Water: The Wrong Choice paragraph 4", it states that the city tap water companies must follow safe strict rules to make sure nothing in the water harms us. The bottles water

However, in response to the previous paragraph there are plenty of people in the world who are for bottled water and think that it is worth the cost. “Bottled water has the lightest environmental footprint of all packaged beverages”. (Lauria, 665).

Seventy percent of the human body is comprised of water. This makes drinking water quality vital. The EPA estimates the average adult consumes 1.2 liters daily or 115 gallons of community (tap) water daily while the average consumption of bottled water per capita in the U.S. is in excess of 30.8 gallons per year and is expected to continue to increase according to the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) and the Beverage Marketing Association’s 2013 report. Bottled water costs anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times more per gallon than the average cost of tap, but people’s perception that bottled water is purer, safer or healthier is driven, in part, by strong bottled water marketing campaigns that focus on news reports about crises that involve municipal water supplies. (NRDC, “Bottled Water Pure Drink or Pure Hype”) The sources for both tap and bottled waters as well as additives to either enrich or neutralize contents of water determine the mineral and chemical composition of drinking water. Is bottled water really any purer or healthier than local tap water?

In fact 22% of test water bottle brands had chemical contaminants higher than the state limit (ABC, 1). So why do Americans think bottled water is so great? Maybe it’s because of how much companies advertise the product, advertising expenses for bottled water totaled $61 million in 2012 ("International Bottled Water Association" 1). Whatever the reason may be, bottled water is the second most popular beverage in the U.S.A., and more and more bottles of water are being produced and distributed this very second.

Water is an essential part to human life. We as humans need around eight to twelve cups per day to make up for the fact that throughout normal functions such as breathing and sweating we lose an average of ten cups per day. To make sure that we are healthy and everything runs properly, we must make sure we drink the right amount of water (msnbc.com, 2004). The one question when thinking about water is what type of water will you drink? The biggest controversy is bottled water vs. tap water. Many people in the world today are switching from drinking tap water to drinking bottled water. The number of people who drink bottled water has been rising over the past few decades and by an average of 7% per year. A

Water is essential to life, scientific fact, not debatable (Tracy). More than half of all Americans drink bottled water; about a third of the public consumes it regularly (Olsen). Many drink or buy bottled water simply because they believe it is of better quality, cleaner, and better tasting. On the contrary, several individuals do not know the cons of drinking bottled water. Today, there are many misconceptions and myths about bottled water. Many people are uneducated about what goes into our bottles and how it not only affects us but also our environment. In the article “The New Oil” by Jeneen Interlandi and Ryan Tracy they discuss the issues that have to do with water and the privatization of it. They believe there is a crisis and something has to be done. Due to the cost, pollution, shortage, and health issues, bottled water should be outlawed. Water should not be controlled by water bottle companies and should not be allowed to be sold in plastic bottles.

I have always found it sort of curious when I see people buying bottled water. My grandfather told me that when he was a boy they drank water from the hose and it was free. I know growing up our household certainly didn’t bother with things like that, so facet water is what we got as well. The costs of groceries these days is expensive, spending extra money on water always seemed like such a waste to me. Now, that being said, some people live in areas where the water isn’t very clean, and buying bottled water is much safer than drinking the city’s water. Also, bottled water has become more popular because it is paired as a service; Bottled water is easy to grab on the go. It takes more time to find a water bottle, with a lid, and fill it up than to grab an already bottled water.

In a qualitative study performed in the United Kingdom, “the majority of participants associated bottled water with having fewer impurities than tap water, and were more likely to trust the quality of bottled water than tap water” (Ward). Individuals with well water should also be attentive to the purity of their water supply, as it is not even held to regulation standard. Looking at the facts though, bottled water is regulated by Food and Drug Administration in equivalence to the Environmental Protection Agency who holds the public officials accountable for the standards of tap water (Hogan & Larsen). This is not to say, though, that there is not human error on both sides that can cause room for contamination of a drinking supply and jeopardize the safety of the

According to a four-year, detailed investigation to evaluate the quality and safety of bottled water conducted by an environmental advocacy group, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), traces of various chemicals (THMs such as chloroform and BDCM, both probable human carcinogens) and arsenic were discovered in high levels. Another chemical found in PET plastic bottles is antimony that is harmless in small doses but in larger doses can cause nausea, vomiting, and death. (Ban the Bottle, 2014) A senior scientist at the NRDC, Dr. Gina Solomon told The New York Times that “there is no reason to believe that bottled water is safer than tap water.” (Ban the Bottle, 2014) Public water in the U.S. is heavily regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because they require numerous tests for bacteria daily which are available to the public. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates bottled water and only require tests on a weekly basis and does not share their discoveries with neither the public nor EPA. (Ban the Bottle,

In Peter Gleick’s “Selling Bottled Water: The Modern Medicine Show” and Cynthia Barnett’s “Business in a Bottle”, bottled water is argued to be an excessive commodity falsely advertised as healthier and more beneficial than tap water to society and the environment. Both authors discuss that bottled water is actually equivalent in quality to tap water and in some cases even more hazardous to the human body. Public water itself is a less expensive resource that is more accessible to the masses. However, due to fraudulent companies focused on profit and the lack of effective oversight, people are deterred from realizing that there does not need to be an alternative to municipal water. Gleick

Tap water is extremely cheaper than bottled water is. According to Livingston, tap water costs only $2.00 every thousand gallons, whereas the cost per gallon of bottled water is $1.21. "That means, priced by gallon, bottled water is more than 600 times more expensive than tap water" (Livingston). Buying a bottled water may be cheaper at the time, however, that $1.00 or so adds up. When people buy bottled water, it is often the same as tap, just that’s been filtered or purified (Livington). So, why spend money on bottled water when it's rather identical to tap, with no

Many people believe that their source of water does not matter and has little or no consequences. Most of those people argue that all water is the same but for those worried about our environment, bottled water is highly wasteful because they believe it’s more appealing because it might be contaminated. The reason this should be important to our society is that good clean water is fundamental to a good health. Our current generations purchase their water because they have been convinced that the specific liquid is the purest drink around. But they can’t really say that until they truly know where their water is coming from. Labels can be extremely misleading and deceptive like in one case where a company claimed their water came from pure

Water is said to be tasteless, but is it? ABC news ran a taste test and these are the results. “Evian, the top-selling bottled water Aquafina, Poland Spring, Iceland Spring…, and American Fare, a discount brand from Kmart, which sells for less than half the price of Evian. We asked people to rate the waters… Lots of people said one of the waters was particularly bad. Was that the tap water? No. Tap water did pretty well… The "20/20" taste test was just one unscientific test, but lots of tests keep finding that people like tap water. I suspect many people who buy the fancy waters are getting suckered by the ads or the labels. In our test of bottled waters, Kmart's American Fare… won. Big-seller Aquafina came in second. Iceland Spring tied the ordinary tap water for third place. Fifth place went to Poland Spring, and in last place, by far, with almost half the testers saying it tasted bad, was the most expensive water -- the fancy French stuff, Evian.” (Is Bottled Water Better than Tap?) ABC news taste test results show that people don’t choose bottled water because the brand taste better, they buy the most costly one. Good Morning America show conducted a study using audience for a blind water taste test, and these are the results. Luckily, many studies and blind taste tests have been performed and have proven that in most cases tap water

Have you ever had any concerns about bottled water? Do you think that bottled water consumption should be banned? Bottled water is water packed in plastic containers and sold for human consumption (Health Canada, 2013). Currently, the amount of bottled water consumed has increased considerably since many people feel it is safer drinking bottled water than tap water (Parent and Wrong, 2014). According to The Statistics Portal, the global sale of bottled water took a leap from 161, 589 to 181, 608 liters from 2009 to 2011. Only in the United States, each American citizen consumed around 32 gallons of bottled water in 2013, thus meaning an equivalent growth of 15, 94% over 2009 (The Statistics Portal, 2014). In fact, due to good portability, bottled water has been helpful in both simple and complex situations such as daily exercises and natural disasters. Even though having those few considerable advantages, bottled water still have been less beneficial; especially due to the negative impacts in the socio-economic, health and environmental fields.

There are basically three ways that water is privatized; bottled water, municipal services and bulk water sales. As a consumer of bottled water I wanted to research further and find out the truth about it. What I discovered was that we as consumers have been fooled by these water corporations. To begin with the cost of bottled water is two thousand times more than tap water. I found it absolutely ludicrous that we are willing to pay such a high price for bottled water considering it costs close to nothing to drink water from the tap. In reality, as I found out, most bottled water which we believe comes from some exotic spring is actually filtered tap water from a U.S. city. According to Food & Water Watch one third of all bottled water comes from a public water source. #4