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By Root 461 0

bottled water corporations were taking over local water supplies, often paying next to nothing for the privilege. In Nestlé’s case, the company was tapping underground aquifers around the United States, as citizens from Maine to California and Michigan to Texas complained about dried-up streams and dropping water levels around their plants. But at least Nestlé could legitimately call its “spring water” a unique beverage. Coke and Pepsi were bottling municipal tap water, passing ostensibly clean water through additional purification processes, and then selling it for a huge markup. Meanwhile, Coke’s huge advertising campaign touting Dasani’s “purity” further undermined public confidence in tap water, they argued, leading to more bottled water sales and less investment in public infrastructure.

By the time CAI began sounding the alarm in 2004, consumers were spending some $9 billion annually on bottled water in the United States, consuming an average of twenty-three gallons of the stuff per person (those numbers have since risen to $11 billion and twenty-nine gallons). Each year, sales increased by almost 10 percent—reminiscent of Goizueta-era Coke before the backlash over obesity began. In fact, as soft drinks started to decline in sales for the first time, Coke increasingly promoted water as a healthy alternative, spending tens of millions of dollars to rebrand itself as a “hydration” company, and replacing Coke signs with Dasani signs on the sides of vending machines. All of those marketing messages sunk in; a Gallup poll at the time found three in four Americans drank bottled water, and one in five drank only bottled water.

Despite its popularity, however, a growing body of evidence has shown bottled water to be no purer or safer than tap—and in some ways, potentially less safe. That’s because tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which imposes strict limits on contaminants and mandates daily testing and mandatory notification of problems. Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which by its own admission has set a “low priority” for regulating bottled water plants. Its standards are slightly lower on some contaminants, and it requires only weekly testing and voluntary recalls in the case of problems.

And sure enough, the benzene scare over Perrier and the bromate controversy in Britain are just the beginning of the problems with bottled water quality over the years. A classic study by the Natural Resources Defense Council of more than one thousand bottles of water in 1999 found that while most samples were safe, nearly a quarter tested above state standards for bacterial or chemical contamination (only 4 percent violated weaker federal standards). More recent studies have continued to find problems: In 2000, the American Medical Association found some bottled water had bacterial counts twice the level of tap. A 2002 study by the University of Tuskegee of brands including Dasani, Aquafina, and Poland Spring found mercury, arsenic, and other chemicals above the EPA limits. A 2004 study by the FDA found low levels of perchlorate, a derivative of rocket fuel, in samples of spring water. As recently as 2008, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found thirty-eight different pollutants in bottled water, ranging from bacteria to fertilizer and Tylenol, and concluded that consumers “can’t trust that bottled water is pure or cleaner than tap water.” (The study did not reveal the types of water it tested, saying only that they were “popular” brands.)

That spotty safety record of bottled water doesn’t let tap off the hook. The same analysts at EWG found that tap water from forty-two states met federal standards for contaminants but still included a range of toxic goodies, including gasoline additives and endocrine disruptors, for which the government had not set limits. In early 2008, the Associated Press reported traces of pharmaceutical drugs and hormones in the water in twenty-four American cities, affecting 41 million people. True,