Tap Water v Bottled Water

Guernsey Water is always keen to educate people about the quality of our tap water, particularly in comparison with bottled water, which is more expensive, more damaging to the environment and not as thoroughly treated and tested. Early in 2010, a leaflet was released called ‘Why Tap Water is Good For You...’, which concentrated on the many health benefits of drinking plenty of water, and briefly touched on the advantages that tap water has over bottled water. You can download this leaflet by clicking here.

However, bottled water continues to enjoy significant popularity with the public, so Guernsey Water wanted to encourage local establishments such as restaurants, bars and hotels to be more forthcoming in offering customers tap water instead of bottled water.

Therefore, in September/October 2010, Guernsey Water carried out a survey to ask the public for their opinions on tap v bottled water. The full analysis from the survey can be found here.

Customers were very much in agreement that the quality of Guernsey's tap water is very good, and that it should be made more readily available at local establishments. With the support of customers, Guernsey Water will be publishing these results to the media and sending out letters to local establishments encouraging them to be more forthcoming in offering tap water instead of bottled water to customers.

Here are the main reasons why tap water is a better choice than bottled water:

Affordability

Although the cost to produce tap water and bottled water varies around the world, it is always the case that tap water is significantly cheaper than bottled. In Guernsey, a litre of tap water costs around £0.001p, while the average litre of bottled water costs about £1. This means that tap water is about 1,000 times cheaper than bottled water.

According to government and industry estimates, about one quarter of bottled water is actually bottled tap water anyway (and by some accounts this could be as much as 40%). This demonstrates that the high cost of bottled water comes from the manufacture and transport of the plastic bottles rather than the sourcing of the water itself.

Quality

A number of recent studies have shown that bottled water is often less safe to drink than tap water. By way of an example, a team of scientists in Canada found that 70 per cent of popular bottled water brands available in shops had much higher levels of bacteria compared to tap water. Some bottles were even found to have heterotrophic bacteria counts of one hundred times more than the permitted limit.

Bottled water does have quality criteria, but it is much less strict and prescriptive than tap water treatment. Tap water in Guernsey goes through an extremely methodical and reliable treatment process, and is tested thousands of times during the year. 2009 saw over 7,000 water samples taken at different points in the treatment process, and 99.86% of these samples passed the strict criteria set by the UK’s Drinking Water Inspectorate, which tests against miniscule amounts of over 130 different chemicals and bacteriological elements.

Bottled water manufacturers don't test for organic chemicals, and a study conducted by Suffolk County in the USA on 88 bottled waters showed some horrifying results. It was this study which discovered the cancer agent, benzene, in Perrier and caused it to be withdrawn, but they also found Freon (trade name for a CFC), kerosene (paraffin), toluene (paint thinner) trichloroethylene (solvent/anaesthetic) and xylene (solvent) in a number of other bottled waters.

Although there have been no comparable studies conducted in the UK, there is no reason to suppose that a similar problem does not exist as manufacturers use similar techniques to those used in the USA. The only monitoring that is carried out is by the water companies themselves - and they don't publish the findings.

Sustainability/Environment

The production and transport of bottled water wastes large amounts of fossil fuels, and the used bottles become a major source of waste. A recent study calculated that the bottled water industry in the UK generates about 33,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year through transport alone, which is the equivalent to the annual energy consumption of 6,000 homes. Industry figures state that the UK consume 1.5 billion litres of water each year from bottles made out of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - a plastic made out of crude oil, which takes 450 years to break down in a landfill site.

In America, the annual spend on bottled water is roughly $100 billion. When you consider that 1.1 billion people around the globe languish without a secure drinking-water supply, this seems like major profligacy. American demand for bottled water means the consumption of 1.5 million barrels of oil annually in order to manufacture the PET bottles, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for an entire year. 

In terms of carbon emissions for the whole process (i.e. from production to consumption), bottled water emits about 300 times more carbon than tap water. So not only is tap water the cheaper and healthier choice, is it also much more environmentally friendly. As a process, the production and consumption of bottled water is massively unsustainable and damaging to the environment.

Although efforts are made to recycle a small amount of bottle waste, almost half of the remaining 14 percent that is, meaning more carbon miles.

Sources

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7763038/Bottled-water-contains-more-bacteria-than-tap-water.html
www.crystalline-water.com/info/bottled_water_facts.html
www.planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/kick-the-plastic-bottle-habit.html

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