Bottled Water vs Tap Water

Many people have turned to bottled water as an alternative to tap water. In fact, US consumers spend more than $7 billion per year on bottled water alone.  The pictures are heartening—bottles with pictures of nature, mountains and natural springs emblazon the bottle. The makers of these products want you to believe that you’re choosing healthy and naturally-pure water.  The majority of Americans believe that bottled water is safer and healthier for you than tap water when, in fact, the opposite is true.

Let’s start with the regulations alone.  Bottled water, because it is classified as a “food”, falls under the standards of the US Food and Drug Administration.  Regular tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.  Believe it or not, the EPA guidelines are stricter than the FDA restrictions for bottled water.  You could have bottled water acceptable by the FDA but not acceptable to be used as ordinary tap water. The amount of testing for the purity of tap water is much higher than the amount of testing done on bottled water.  Even with loose FDA guidelines, not every corporation complies consistently with the recommendations.  Tests for Cryptosporidium in the water (a parasite) aren't even recommended for bottled water.  This is in spite of a 1999 study by the NRDC which showed that about 20% of bottled water testing contained higher than acceptable bacterial counts. 

Bottled water comes in—of course—a bottle made of plastic.  Bottles usually have a number stamped on the bottom of them that is inside of a triangle.  Most bottled water comes numbered as #1, which means it’s made from polyethylene terephthalate. This leaches out of the plastic in the bottle and becomes dissolved into your bottled water.  Phthalates are what are called “xenoestrogens”—chemicals that mimic estrogen in the system and cause the body to become dominant in estrogen.  Conditions like endometriosis, uterine fibroids, and infertility are the result of estrogen dominance.  After long term use, the phthalates are cancer-causing, particularly with reproductive organs.  As an aside, the harder the plastic, the higher is the number on the bottom and the safer the plastic is. The plastic in bottled water is the least safe of all plastic containers.

Bottled water is basically an ecological nightmare. It takes huge amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture, transport, and store bottled water.  Once you drink the water, you throw the plastic away (if you don’t recycle plastic).  Of the 89 billion liters of bottled water produced annually, about 1 ½ million tons (or three billion pounds) of plastic end up in a landfill.  If burned, the byproducts of plastics filter through the air and land on cropland and grazing areas where animals consume the waste product and pass the xenoestrogens to us.  If stored in a land fill, the plastic just sits there and degrades very little into anything biodegradable. Rather, the plastic leaches phthalates into the groundwater, which finally ends up in your tap water.  The vast majority of bottles are stored in landfills, polluting the environment and adding to ground water contamination.  This means that you drink water from bottles that contain phthalates in the water and eventually, if you drink tap water, you ingest phthalates then, too.

Some bottled water contains fluoride, while other types do not.  Fluoride in the water is there for the prevention of tooth decay, especially in children.  If an individual never drinks fluoridated water, the risk of developing tooth decay can be higher than average. As you'll see later, some independent studies showed interesting results when they tested for fluoride in bottled water.

Find out how using a Aquasana water filter can eliminate the cost of bottled water and provide you with better quality drinking water > Aquasana Water Filters