Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [57]
And then there’s this: if bottled water is packaged and sold within the same state, it’s exempt from regulation by the FDA. But that hardly ever happens, says Joseph Doss, president of the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), “because the bottle, the label, and the cap all have to come from the same state.” He can’t tell me which bottlers fit these criteria. If a bottler is exempt from FDA oversight, it is subject to state standards, which vary widely in rigor and scope. Roughly one in five states has no bottled-water standards at all. Luckily, the IBWA subjects its members to annual surprise inspections and stricter health standards. For example, IBWA has zero tolerance for fecal coliform (unlike the FDA). Unfortunately, its standards aren’t legally binding or enforceable, not every bottler is a member (Nestlé is; Coke and Pepsi aren’t), and consumers have no way of learning the results of inspections.
When a lot of people get sick from tap water, the public hears about it. The reporting system for bottled water is more porous. There have been no confirmed cases of illness from drinking bottled water in the United States (though there have been about a hundred recalls here, and plenty of reports of illness associated with bottled water in Africa, Asia, and Europe). Either it hasn’t happened in the U.S., it hasn’t been reported to the public, or it’s happened but the source of the illness wasn’t successfully traced. If there is a recall, the news often arrives late. A report from the Worldwatch Institute notes, “in most cases the products may be recalled up to 15 months after the problematic water was produced, distributed, and sold.”
Problematic water doesn’t always, or even often, send you rushing to the bathroom, let alone to your gastroenterologist. But its consequences can be worse, over the long haul. In 2006, springwater produced in and sold throughout western New York State was found to contain up to twenty-five parts per billion of the carcinogen bromate, a level two and a half times higher than the EPA limit. (Bromate is formed when bromide, which is naturally occurring and harmless, meets ozone during purification.) The industry cited the subsequent recall as proof that the system works. Those who drank dangerous levels of bromate for well over a month probably feel differently.
The Poland Spring bottling plant in Hollis, Maine, fills between five and six million bottles a day, 358 days a year. A $240 million affirmation of market trends, it’s the largest such plant in North America. Tom Brennan and Bill Maples, its manager, invite me to take a look around, but first they get me to put on a hairnet, safety glasses, and earplugs. Now I look like an alien too.
Emerging through double doors onto the production floor, I need a few moments to get my bearings. Almost everything seems to be in motion: small plastic tubes called preforms glide along overhead “airveyor” belts. Blasts of air expand them into half-liter bottles, which dangle from their necks like chickens in a processing plant. Three lines of empties swerve and merge into a single stream. “Powered by air,” Maples yells over the roar, all pride.
Inside a small, glass-walled room under positive air pressure, one machine fills the bottles and another caps them, twelve hundred per minute. Turning a corner, I smell melting plastic—“That’s the laser, etching on codes,” Maples says. Working at blur speed, machines slap on the famous green label, corral bottles into cases, wrap cases in polyethylene film. Humans take over from here, stacking the cases five feet high.
I take a moment to drink it all in and ask Maples how many bottles we’re contemplating. “Twenty-five million,” he says, gesturing to the canyon of water that covers six acres of the plant’s floor. It will be gone in less than a week, replaced by twenty-five million bottles more.
Before leaving, I take a quick