Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [55]
College lets out for the summer, and battalions of youthful volunteers from the noisy pressure group Corporate Accountability International (CAI) start hanging banners in public plazas across the nation. They fill plastic cups with water and invite open-minded passersby to take the Tap Water Challenge. More often than not, sippers can’t differentiate between bottled water and tap. That’s the first step in CAI’s campaign to wean Americans from the bottle. But taste isn’t everything, I’m learning. There’s also the question of health.
After saying good-bye to Michael Mascha in Bryant Park, I cap my bottle of Singaporean NEWater and, back home, send its last few ounces to a water-testing lab. There isn’t enough to run every assay, but I’m most interested in the nitrate level. Nitrate, remember, is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. It gets into drinking water from fertilizer and from animal and human waste. NEWater is, of course, made almost exclusively of the latter.
Rose, at the testing lab in Cleveland, isn’t fazed to learn the provenance of my water, but she explains that the sample will be technically invalid, because it’s more than a week old and hasn’t been kept on bacteria-inhibiting ice. I tell her it’s all the NEWater I’ve got and recite my credit-card number. When the results arrive in two weeks, I’m pleasantly surprised. Levels of metals and volatile organic compounds, including disinfection by-products, fall within safe ranges. And nitrate is only 2.8 parts per million—far less than Perrier’s 18 ppm (or the EPA limit of 10). I want to call Mascha to gloat, but restrain myself.
Every now and then, academic scientists, environmental groups, or a municipality with something to prove decide to test the quality of bottled water, which, boasting of purity and healthfulness (or, in NEWater’s case, its incontrovertible sustainability) seems to invite vicious attack. Inevitably, the testers report flaws. (If they don’t come up with flaws, we don’t hear the news: too dog-bites-man.)
The granddaddy of all bottled-water tests, if only for the amount of publicity it received, was performed in 1998 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which looked at a thousand samples of 103 different brands of bottled water. A third showed such contaminants as arsenic, bromine, and coliform bacteria. In some samples, arsenic and carcinogenic compounds (disinfection by-products, that is) exceeded either state or industry standards; in others, those contaminants were present but at levels that didn’t set off alarm bells. (The bottled-water-industry-supported Drinking Water Research Foundation refutes many of the claims made by the NRDC report.) In 2004, the FDA ran its own tests and found perchlorate at 0.45 ppb and 0.56 ppb in two samples of spring-water. The levels were below those set by the few states that have a standard (the feds don’t), but even a hint of rocket fuel, it’s safe to say, isn’t what consumers of springwater are expecting.
Arsenic is another story. When the FDA found 454 to 674 parts per billion in Jermuk water, from Armenia, it halted imports (the EPA and FDA limit is 10 ppb). The brand’s die-hard Armenian-American fans were furious: “We’ve been drinking it all our life,” they said. “It’s a little piece of home.”
In 1994, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment tested eighty brands of bottled water and found that at least 15 percent contained phthalates, a softening agent used in plastics, in amounts that exceeded federal standards; more than half contained the disinfection by-product chloroform, and slightly less than half contained bromodichloromethane—also a disinfection by-product. Twenty-five contained arsenic, fifteen contained lead, and nineteen had selenium, a trace mineral that, like many, is toxic in large amounts