Ross Wallace, Today Online 10 Nov 07;
IN THE '70s and '80s, it was the Pepsi Challenge — where the popular American soft drink maker defied consumers in a blind taste test to distinguish between Pepsi and Coke.
These days, it's what you might call the Great H2O Experiment, with the public being asked as part of a similar test to choose which is bottled water and which is water from the tap.
It is the brainchild of critics who claim the bottled water industry chalks up worldwide gross earnings of about US$400 billion ($576 billion) each year by selling consumers something they could easily get for next-to-nothing.
"People used to be able to drink water on the go from public water fountains," said Ms Deborah Lapidus, national organiser of the Boston-based Think Outside the Bottle Campaign.
"Now, public fountains have kind of gone the way of pay phones and instead you've got fancy vending machines."
And what's inside the bottles in those machines? It's Ms Lapidus' claim that much of the water people pay for — as much as US$4 a litre — is identical to what comes from their taps for pennies a glass.
In that conviction, she and the anti-corporate abuse group she leads are not alone. "People have the right idea in trying to avoid chlorine and fluoride from their tap water since research has linked the chemicals to cancers," said nutritionist Thomas Van Ohlen, co-author of the United States bestseller 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Health.
"The unfortunate problem is that some of the major manufacturers of bottled water are using the same water that comes from the consumer's municipal water supply."
While it might be mind-boggling to think the bottled water industry has for decades gotten away with charging a 1,000 to 10,000 per cent premium on water sourced from public reservoirs, some bottlers recently admitted that this is exactly what has been happening.
Earlier this year, Pepsico Inc — maker of Aquafina, the No 1 bottled water brand in the United States — had to change the labels on its bottled water to show that it originates from public water sources.
Three years earlier, when beverage industry arch rival Coca-Cola Co recalled its Dasani bottled mineral water in Britain after finding it contained illegal levels of cancer-causing bromate, it emerged that the No 2 US bottled water brand was also simply filtered tap water.
This despite studies showing that many of the Americans who spent more than US$11 billion to consume 31 billion litres of bottled water last year did so in the belief that the quality was superior to that of water from public works systems.
Recent events might have opened a few eyes to the steep mark-up on bottled water and undermined public confidence in its purity, but they haven't kept the industry from defending itself against what it sees as undeserved backlash.
"We're not in competition with tap water but with other packaged beverage products," said Mr Stephen Kay, spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association, a Virginia-based industry trade group.
As for the purity of the industry's products, Mr Kay added that "sophisticated, very high levels of filtration and purification" ensure that, quality-wise, what comes out of the bottle far exceeds what comes out of the kitchen tap.
But as any convert to the swelling ranks of the anti-bottled water movement quickly learns, quite the opposite is true.
In the US, tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency and must undergo 22 tests for quality. Bottled water, on the other hand, is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration and is put through only eight tests.
"It's not that bottled water is going to kill you," said Mr Jon Coifman, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defence Council, an environmental action group based in New York City. "But there's also no reason to believe it's better."
Of course, not every brand on the market amounts to re-filtered tap water. At least 60 per cent of bottled waters — including marquee brands such as Evian, Fiji and Poland Spring — come directly from natural water sources.
However, that doesn't necessarily make them 100 per cent safe to drink.
Unlike tap water, bottled spring water contains no water-purifying chlorine, which means that even though the bottle may be sterilised repeatedly, the plastic still yields bacteria-supporting nutrients capable of transforming what began as "pure" water into something that doesn't quite live up to the name.
Then, there's the environmental impact of the doubling of global consumption of bottled water to 180 billions litres a year from 78 billion litres just a decade ago.
For example, an estimated 2.7 million tons of plastic are used each year to make water bottles — an estimated 90 per cent of which ends up in landfills or as litter next to roads and in waterways.
"It's ironic that many people drink bottled water because they are afraid of tap water; the bottles they discard can result in more polluted water," said Ms Pat Franklin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute in Washington.
