http://www.care2.com/greenliving/bottled-water-craze-gone-crazy.html
Bottled Water Craze Gone Crazy
Bottled water–how did it come to this? The tag line for a new bottled water called Tap’dNY is “No glaciers were harmed making this water.”
I have to think we have a problem when a company starts selling bottled water with an environmentally friendly spin. Tap’dNY is bottled, filtered New York City tap water. Now I happen to live on NYC tap water and think it’s pretty delicious–but to put it in a bottle with a marketing campaign that includes an environmental manifesto stinks of greenwashing in a way so curiously blatant that I am almost certain this must be a conceptual art piece. But now that I am actually seeing the bottles in the supermarket, I’m thinking something has gone terribly wrong. I’m all for poignant novelties–but when they come in polyethylene terephthalate bottles, not so much.
The idea of Tap’dNY is that if you’re going to drink bottled water, make sure it’s local. (OK, how about not drinking bottled water–how’s that?) But here they have a point–not about drinking bottled water, but about drinking local water. Which brings me to a Forbes Traveler story on the Most Expensive Bottled Water. There’s your basic spring water from Tennessee called BlingH20–and for a mere $36 per bottle you get “couture water that makes an announcement like a Rolls Royce Phantom” (gag), according to the Bling site. But if you really want to get all Louis IV with your water, drink icebergs and glaciers, like 10 Thousand BC “luxury glacier water”–which rings in at $45 per bottle.
I’m fascinated by these waters. What does it say about our culture that someone would spend $45 on 12,000-year-old water? It says to me that our world has become so polluted that purity takes on mythic proportions. That something that has been protected from our toxic chaos is so rare that it is twisting our idea of what is right and wrong. I admit the idea of drinking something so pure seems inherently curative, but at what cost? (Not to mention that the purity must be compromised during the harvesting, processing, bottling, etc.) Sorry, but the idea of using the energy to harvest and melt icebergs, bottle it, and ship them all over the globe is screwy beyond. Come to think of it, it almost makes bottled NYC tap water seem like a good idea.
Since I don’t have a glacier in my backyard to go suck on, I am thankful to have great municipal tap water. (For those of you who don’t know it, as counter-intuitive as it may be, NYC does have award-winning, really excellent tap water.) I drink it from the tap, fill up my kids’ SIGG bottles and call it a day. No glaciers are harmed while I hydrate.
For those of you without great water, here are some places to find out about filtration and purification:
Well Water Filters Other Than Reverse Osmosis
Tips for Selecting Water Purifiers
Filters for Municipal Water
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25 comments
add your comment »i used to go to a health food store in california where the owner had people collect water from different cities -- not only in ca but from their travels to other states. some of the water was pretty grim.
one town in particular -- i can't remember which city it was - but the tap water was gray.
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I was a bottled water enthusiast before becoming a care2 member. Now I have a Brita filter and reusable safe plastic bottles (I can't afford stainless steele). I wanted to direct everyone's attention to an article I read recently about Fiji Water in particular, and bottled water in general. If you want more injformation after reading the article, you can search the site for the Fiji company spokesman's response to the article, and their response to reader questions as well. I personally love the taste of Fiji (to me it tastes like it has a hint of flowers), but I'll have a a hard time drinking it after this. Happy reading!
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle
I'll also add that my public water comes from teh Susqueehana river (which flows past two nuclear power plants on its way to me) and that when I first moved here, no one - NO ONE - drank tap water, and in fact when my in-laws, who I was visiting, ran out of bottled water and I said I'd rather have tap than nothing to take my medications, they instead ran out to the store and bought more water, rather than let me have even a few drops of tap. Now, that might sound over-the-top to you, but when we moved to our apartment here, we forgot to buy water once and I drank tap for three days straight and felt very sick - chills, aches, nausea, bloating, stomach pain. I can drink it just fine with my Brita filter, however. In California where I used to live the water would turn white and cloudy if you
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ps -- i LOVE the taste of dasani water. would much rather drink it than the awful tap water we have here where i live in washington.
would anyone REALLY want to drink water that comes out white from the tap and takes upwards of half an hour to get clear???
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in 2006 i went back to california for a week. a friend and i went to dinner. neither one of us will willingly drink any water that comes out of a tap in california.
so, i bought a bottle of water for us to drink. in fact, i bought TWO bottles of the stuff. after i got back home here to washington, i happened to look at how much i had paid for those bottles -- i think it was either $5 or $10 a bottle.
o well! it was more important that my friend and i had something to drink that we both enjoyed. some people spend more than that for a bottle of wine when they eat.
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i have a small RO unit at home which i think is a good option if you have unreliable water quality every once in a while. and even if it's consistent, there are things that conventional treatment does not remove - hormones, pharmaceutical residues, other dissolved chemicals. with automatic cutoff for the pump that replenishes the water storage, it's pretty ok. the downside is it generates backwash water - but i use that for washing floors and supplementing the washing machine water (i have a top-loading machine).
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I've read that most bottle water is from the municipal tap anyways (think Deerpark, Dansi, etc). So we are paying a high premium for tap water. Ric Edelman, the financial planner on TV, says if people invest the money they were spending on bottle water, they could be making $250,000 on it - well that was before the markets took a tumble. Just something to ponder - are we spending our kid's college money or our retirement money on water?
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Ps - I live in london, I drink London Tap water, always have done always will do, seems ok to me, -- how about you ? xx
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Very good story and valid points. At least this product markets its muni source. Dasani water is (or at least was) sourced from the Chattahoochee river in Atlanta. Same source as Atlanta's drinking water! Cheers (h2o speaking)...
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CAN YOU IMAGINE DRINKING ANYTHING WITH PLASTIC LACED IN IT?
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I think drinking bottled water is a joke. The chemicals from the plastics leaching into the water would be harmful. Plus the bottles are tossed and fill up the landfill. Come on people. Put a filter on your faucet and call it a day!
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