Obsession with bottled water harming environment, ‘unethical'

24 April, 2007A number of organisations connected with environment, social justice and religion have come down heavily upon America’s obsession with drinking the costly, bottled ‘natural’ water, instead of consuming water from the tap, since the practice adds to global warming, besides being ‘unethical.’

People must think about all the unnecessary energy costs that go into making a bottle of water, says Peter Gleick, an expert on water policy and director of a think tank called the Pacific Institute, based in Oakland, California, the United States.

Over 8 billion gallons of bottled water is consumed annually in the United States – representing $11 billion in sales.

The Earth Policy Institute has estimated that, making the plastic for the bottles needs about 1.5 million barrels of oil, which is enough to fuel 100,000 cars a year. Nearly 90% of the bottles are not recycled.

Peter Gleick presents a simple way to visualise the average cost of energy for the whole exercise – to make the plastic, process and fill the bottle, transport bottled water to market and then deal with the waste: “It would be like filling up a quarter of every bottle with oil.”

One of the easiest ways, he suggests, for the people to cut the enormous costs in making bottled water is to is to drink tapped water. A filter can be used if one does not like the taste of tapped water.

Despite the United States generally having high-quality tapped water, it is the world’s largest market for bottled water. There are a number of explanations for this being put forward by the suppliers of bottled water, including the argument that it is cleaner than tapped water.

But this contention does not hold water, according to Gina Solomon, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Says she: “The bottled water industry is selling a vision of purity and people are buying it with the best of intentions. What they don’t realise is that bottled water is actually much less regulated than tapped water. There are a number of studies in which we find arsenic, disinfection byproducts and bacteria in bottled water.”

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for regulating bottled water, had, in March 2007, recalled Jermuk bottled water, sold in California under five brand names, after finding levels of arsenic high enough to cause nausea.

The FDA does allow trace levels of contaminants in bottled water based on the same criteria set by the Environmental Protection Agency for tapped water. However, the FDA’s website also says that bottled water plants generally are assigned a low priority for inspection.

The FDA is required to inspect water-bottling plants twice a year. In Washington, that duty is often delegated to inspectors with the state Department of Agriculture.

The bottled water market is big business. Wall Street and investment managers are forecasting that the bottled water market will keep growing. Some financial investment managers have even gone to the extent of saying that bottled water is the next-best thing to oil or diamonds.

And, here is where the question of ethics comes in. The United Church of Christ, United Church of Canada, National Council of Churches, National Coalition of American Nuns and Presbyterians for Restoring Creation are among the religious organisations that have raised questions about the ‘privatisation’ of water.

They consider the industrial purchase, packaging and selling of water – which is a basic resource – at enormous prices as nothing but unethical. Bottled water costs about 1,000 times the price of tapped water!