Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [66]
How about bacteria or cysts? No—they are too small to be trapped by the charcoal, at least in the pour-through filter. “With the on-tap model,” Chavanne says, “the carbon block is tight enough to exclude cysts. If it were that tight in the pour-through, water couldn’t get through on gravity alone.” (The PUR Plus filter, which sports a “pleated microfilter,” claims to remove cysts of crypto and giardia; the regular filter reduces more or less the same contaminants as the Brita.)
Chlorine’s yucky taste is the reason a lot of otherwise sane people drink bottled water. But removing chlorine doesn’t require much equipment: all you have to do is let your water stand a few hours in an uncovered pitcher or jug.
“Does Brita’s tight cover prevent chlorine from offgassing?” I ask Chavanne.
“Hmm,” she says, thinking. “If you fill your reservoir, in six minutes the water has filtered through. So the carbon would remove the chlorine.”
“And without chlorine in the water, can the bacteria regrow?”
“Yes, if you leave your filtered water in the sun for days, you may see microorganisms appear. But it’s the same with water that hasn’t been through a Brita: there are organisms in the air, on our lips, and hands. If you use well water, God knows what’s in there.”
“So people with well water shouldn’t rely on—” I was about to say charcoal filters, but Chavanne interrupts me.
“Their well!” She isn’t against well water per se, it turns out, but she highly recommends that people with wells test their water. (Standard tests for microbes cost about sixty-five dollars; tests for pesticides and herbicides can bring the bill to well over four hundred dollars. Testing for all possible pollutants could run more than two grand.)
“Can Brita filters be recycled?” A quick calculation tells me Americans went through more than sixty million between 2002 and 2007. “In Europe, people return them to retailers, who return them to Brita,” Chavanne says. The company segregates the carbon from the resin, then sells the charcoal for use in road construction. The resin beads are stripped of the metals they pulled from water and then processed into new beads. In the United States, of course, the culture of returning products to manufacturers is in its infancy. Brita did it for a while here, then lost its charcoal buyer. For now, the filters go in the trash.
As 2007 winds down, opposition to bottled water is still winding up. Going into autumn, sales have dropped only slightly, but it’s hard to say if it’s due to activist pressure, cool weather, high prices (oil costs more) or, as Nestlé’s Kim Jeffery says, a lack of natural disasters, which always spur demand. Billions of cases of water continue to march out of supermarkets, and millions of bottles dribble from everyplace else.
“People don’t go backwards,” says Arthur Von Wiesenberger, author of The Pocket Guide to Bottled Water and a consultant to the beverage industry. “Once they’ve developed a taste for bottled water, they won’t give it up.” Market analysts predict that bottled-water consumption and sales for 2007 will, when the final tallies are in, at least match the numbers from 2006; Fiji Water alone expects a 20 percent increase in exports in 2007. New bottling plants open in the United States, Europe, India, and Canada; entrepreneurs announce plans to bottle water in the Amazon, among other fragile landscapes, and Nestlé continues to buy and explore new spring sites.
Still, among a certain psychographic, bottled water is now the mark of the devil, the moral equivalent of driving a Hummer. No longer socially useful, it’s shunned in many restaurants, where ordering tap is all the rage. Writing in Slate, Daniel Gross calls this new snob appeal entirely predictable. “So long as only a few people were drinking Evian, Perrier, and San Pellegrino, bottled water wasn’t perceived as a societal ill.