More and more people are questioning whether the water, and the package it comes in, is safe, or at least safer than tap water — and if the convenience is worth the environmental impact.

Over the past two decades, people have increasingly been shifting to bottled water because they consider it safe, find it refreshing, calorie-free, convenient to carry around, tastier than some tap water and healthier than soft drinks.

Drinking-water may be contaminated by a range of chemical, microbial and physical hazards that could pose risks to health if they are present at high levels. Examples of chemical hazards include lead, arsenic and benzene. Microbial hazards, include bacteria, viruses and parasites, such as Vibrio cholerae, hepatitis A virus, and Crytosporidium parvum, respectively. Physical hazards include glass chips and metal fragments. Because of the large number of possible hazards in drinking-water, the development of standards for drinking-water requires significant resources and expertise, which many countries are unable to afford.

Bottled water and the environment

1. While the bottles come from far away, most of them end up close to home — in a landfill. Most bottled water comes in recyclable PET plastic bottles, but only about 13 percent of the bottles we use get recycled.

2. Plastics travel through our sewage system and land up in the oceans. This poses a huge threat to marine life. To a sea turtle, a floating plastic bag looks like a jellyfish. And plastic pellets, the small hard pieces of plastic from which plastic products are made, look like fish eggs to seabirds. Drifting nets entangle birds, fish and mammals, making it difficult, if not impossible to move or eat. As our consumption of plastic mounts, so too does the danger to marine life.

Bottled water and your health

Some substances may prove more difficult to manage in bottled than tap water. This is generally because bottled water is stored for longer periods and at higher temperatures than water distributed in piped distribution systems. Control of materials used in containers and closures for bottled waters is, therefore, of special concern. In addition, some micro-organisms, which are normally of little or no public health significance, may grow to higher levels in bottled waters. This growth appears to occur less frequently in gasified water and in water bottled in glass containers compared to still water and water bottled in plastic containers. There have also been reports of fraud in which ordinary tap water has been added to used mineral water bottles and sold as the original article. Consumers may not be able to detect this by taste alone and, if concern is warranted, should examine the closures of bottled waters carefully before purchase and insist on seeing bottles opened in their presence in restaurants and other food and beverage service establishments.

Reference:

http://www.copperwiki.org/index.php/Bottled_water