Tap vs. Bottled
by Paul Hebert, Academic Support Center, Lower Manhattan Extension Center
 Take a second to do some quick math: Health officials remind us to drink eight glasses of water a day. If you drank those eight glasses using water from the tap it would cost you approximately 49¢ a year. Drink the same amount in bottled water and it could cost you as much as $1,400 a year (Marsh). That’s a big difference.
With prices ranging from 240-10,000 times the cost of tap water, it’s no wonder bottled water is the fastest-growing sector of the beverage market – worth $16 billion in the United States alone (Blumenfeld, Williams). In recent years it has even outperformed coffee and milk (West).
However, the price of bottled water in terms of cold hard cash is not the only cost we incur when drinking bottled water. There is substantial cost to the environment every time we crack open a refreshingly chilled bottle of water at meetings, at the gym, or at home.
Consider first the packaging of a bottle of water. The plastic used each year for these bottles requires 1.5 million barrels of oil. A substantial amount of water is also used during the production of these plastic bottles: A one-liter bottle of water requires about five liters of water to produce (Päster). Further, roughly 80% of these plastic water bottles will end up in landfills – not in recycling plants – and will account for 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year.
The biggest environmental cost of bottled water, though, comes from transportation and storage. Imported brands, like Perrier and FIJI, travel great distances and the emissions of trucks, airlines and ships are many times the environmental cost of production (Deutsch). Even locally bottled brands of water sold within the same state still require transportation to stores and are kept in refrigeration units at stores – all leaving a significant carbon footprint.
For many, the argument against tap water in favor of bottled water comes down to perceptions of “purity.” Yet, 40% of bottled water sold in the U.S. actually comes from municipal sources – it’s bottled tap water. Regulations governing bottled water and tap water are the same for bottled water traveling over state lines, but less stringent for water produced and sold within a single state (Blumenfeld). Tap water is frequently more often tested than bottled water and results must be made public. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times last year and is consistently ranked in the top ten cleanest U.S. city water supplies (Lee).
Several cities, including New York, have stopped selling water in city buildings or providing it at meetings in order to encourage the use of tap water. The move is not only an environmentally sustainable one, but an important economic decision as well. The city purchased 6,000 bottles of water for city meetings last year. As these efforts show, the issue of bottled water versus tap water is one of changing people’s habits. Emily Lloyd, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, cited smoking, recycling, and seat belts as examples where education and motivation changed what people did every day (Lee).
There is, of course, another side. Some bottled water companies are beginning to make environmentally responsible changes. Many national brands, like Dasani, have reduced the amount of plastic used in bottles. FIJI announced in 2007 it would begin working to not only be carbon neutral, but carbon negative – offsetting inevitable emissions with other measures (Deutsch).
Tap water in many areas of the country is not as clean as it should be, just as bottled water is often not as pure as it is advertised. However, the real question of sustainability in the bottled water issue is the 1.1 billion people in the world who do not have any clean drinking water (Safe Water). Most of the potable water in the world is in developed countries, where bottled water is most popular. In a few cases, as in FIJI, water is taken from countries where many do not have safe drinking water, and provided to western nations where safe water is plentiful. By many estimates, spending the money we do for bottled water to build and fix existing infrastructure could solve the global crisis (Safe Water).
Where your water comes from, and what is its actual cost, are important questions to think of no matter what you drink – whether filling your reusable water bottle from the tap, or purchasing a bottle of water, instead of soda, for health reasons.
References
Blumenfeld, Jared & Susan Leal. "The Real Cost of Bottled Water." San Francisco Chronicle: 2/18/2007, 3/12/2009
Deutsch,
Deutsch, Claudia H. "For Fiji Water, a Big List of Green Goals." New York Times: 11/7/2007, 3/12/2009
Lee, Jennifer. "City Council Shuns Bottles in Favor of Water From Tap." New York Times: 6/17/2008, 3/12/2009
Marsh, Bill. "Times Topic: Bottled Water." New York Times: 3/12/2009
Päster, Pablo. "Ask Pablo: Exotic Bottled Water." AskPablo.com: 2/5/2007, 3/12/2009
"Safe Water System March 2006: A Low-Cost Technology for Safe Drinking Water." United States Center for Disease Control.
West, Larry. "How Much Energy Does It Take to Make Bottled Water?" About.com: 2009, 3/12/2009
Williams, Alex. "Water, Water Everywhere, but Guilt by the Bottleful." New York Times: 8/12/2007, 3/12/09
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