Student Action

US: The real cost of bottled water

The University Daily Kansan. By Mark Sorrik -

Bottled water has also become a favorite among Americans, who buy 28 billion bottles each year, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

Though, amid surging sales, many environmentalists have questioned the logic of bottled water consumption.

Research shows that bottled water offers no significant health benefit that tap water doesn’t offer.

Despite this, consumers pay extra to drink water shipped from exotic locations such as Fiji and France.

The plastic bottles, once discarded, accumulate in city landfills and leach chemicals into the environment.

Health Benefits

Students on campus pay $1.25 for a 20-ounce bottle of Dasani. That translates to $8 per gallon – more than twice as expensive as a gallon of gas. For this hefty price, the bottled water is likely to be just as clean as the municipal tap water Lawrence gets from the Kansas River and Clinton Reservoir.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, federal standards for bottled water are almost identical to those for tap water. As a result, neither one is significantly cleaner than the other.

Though the FDA monitors lead in bottled water more closely than the Environmental Protection Agency monitors tap water, that potential benefit is offset by the presence of fluoride in city water.

Fluoride, which improves dental health, gets filtered out of bottled water.

The Natural Resources Defense Council also estimates that 25 percent of all bottled water, including Aquafina and Dasani, is municipal water taken directly from a tap and purified again.

Water Miles

Even though Americans can get clean, cheap water from their kitchen faucet, the Earth Policy Institute estimates that a quarter of bottled water bought by consumers is shipped across national borders.

Jeff Severin, director of the KU Center for Sustainability, said the “water miles” accumulated during the distribution of bottled water from places such as Fiji or France was a big concern.

“We’re bottling water far away from where it’s purchased, shipping it all over the world and in the process using fossil fuels,” he said.

Petroleum is used not only to ship water, but to manufacture the bottles as well.

The production of the 28 billion bottles of water Americans buy each year uses 1.1 million barrels of oil and releases one billion pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute.

Plastic Pollution

Of the billions of water bottles Americans buy each year, 80 percent end up in landfills or incinerators, even after getting recycled.

Those bottles could take anywhere between 400 and 1,000 years to degrade, the EPI estimates.

Simran Sethi, environmental journalist and Lacy C. Haynes visiting professor in the School of Journalism, said that plastic didn’t biodegrade like many other materials in landfills, it photodegrades, or breaks down from exposure to light and heat.

Chemicals from photodegraded plastic bottles can leach into the water during storage, Sethi said.

“If you’re tasting plastic in your water, you’re ingesting plastic,” she said.

Chemical leaching into bottled water increases the longer a person reuses a plastic bottle. For this reason, Sethi said it was best to avoid plastic altogether.

Beyond the Bottle

Severin said one of the best ways to stay hydrated without bottled water was to buy a reusable stainless steel or aluminum bottle and fill it with tap water.

“You can get the same convenience with a reusable bottle and not be contributing to environmental problems and health concerns,” he said.

Severin also said students could invest in a good water filtration system, such as a water jug or faucet filter if they were worried about contaminants in city water.

At $8 a gallon, bottled water on campus is significantly more expensive than the 24-packs available at grocery stores like HyVee. This water costs about $1.38 per gallon. But those value packs, despite being cheap, still contribute to the negative environmental effects of plastic bottles.

But Sethi said she thought this may change.

Cities such as San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Mich., have already acted on the problem by banning bottled water in city buildings.