Water Filtration

Back-to-the-Tap Movement Gains Momentum

by Janet Larsen

From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water’s environmental impact. The resolution noted that with $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, “the United States’ municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.”

While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco’s departments and agencies, saving a half-million dollars each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees in early 2008.

At the launch of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in October, Mayor Anderson of Salt Lake City described the “total absurdity and irresponsibility, both economic and environmental, of purchasing and using bottled water when we have perfectly good and safe municipal sources of tap water.” He urged city government departments and restaurants to stop buying bottled water.

In November, the city council of Chicago, beleaguered by swelling landfills and a stretched budget, placed a landmark tax of 5¢ on every bottle of water sold in the city in order to discourage consumption. That same month, Illinois state agencies were banned from purchasing bottled water with government funds. With 86 percent of used water bottles in the United States ending up as garbage or litter instead of being recycled, switching from the bottle to the tap helps to alleviate the trash burden.

New York City is urging residents to drink tap water, which is naturally filtered in the protected Catskill forest region. In Kentucky, the Louisville water utility hands out free bottles for residents to fill with “Pure Tap.” Dozens of other local governments are talking up tap water and are looking into banning the bottle.

Tap water promotional campaigns would have seemed quaint a few decades ago, when water in bottles was a rarity. Now such endeavors are needed to counteract the pervasive marketing that has caused consumers to lose faith in the faucet. In fact, more than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, including top-selling Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani. When Pepsi announced in July that it would clearly label its Aquafina water as from a “public water source,” it no doubt shocked everyone who believed that bottles with labels depicting pristine mountains or glaciers delivered a superior product.

Despite the less-frequent quality testing and sometimes commonplace origin of the product, bottled water Read the rest of this entry »

 Many people prefer bottled water because of its taste. The taste of all water has to do with the way it is treated and the quality of its source, including its natural mineral content. Most bottled water comes from a ground water source, where water quality varies less from day to day, or is treated and immediately bottled. Bottled water from a dedicated source or plant may have a more consistent taste than tap water, which comes from surface sources and must travel through pipes to reach homes.

One of the key taste differences between tap water and bottled water is due to how the water is disinfected. Tap water may be disinfected with chlorine, chloramine, ozone or ultraviolet light to kill disease-causing germs. Water systems use these disinfectants chlorine and chloramine because they are effective and inexpensive, and because they continue to disinfect as water travels through pipes to homes and businesses. Bottled water that is disinfected is typically disinfected with ozone or other technologies such as ultraviolet light or chlorine dioxide. Ozone is preferred by bottlers, though it is more expensive than chlorine because it does not leave a taste and because bottlers do not need to worry about maintaining disinfectants in water sealed in a container. Untreated water, whether from a bottle or a tap will invariably have the characteristic taste of its source.

If you are unhappy with the taste of your tap water, but also have a problem with the cost and/or environmental issues related to bottled water, there are a number of water filtration systems on the market today that offer an excellent alternative to both tap and bottled water, from basic filter pitchers to high-tech reverse osmosis units, with the cost factor becoming more and more excessible to the average person.

From the EPA Health Water Series.