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November 29, 2007
Man cannot live on water alone….he needs a bottle too
By Sean Boone
Tap water? You’re kidding, right?
A recent informal Walton Sun poll found that an overwhelming majority of area residents drink bottled water.
The poll asked individuals if they drink tap, purified or bottled drinking water on a regular basis. While some say they prefer the bottle because of its quality and convenience, most just found it to taste better than tap.
“All bottled water, all the time,” said resident Shane Carter. “Its totally based on taste.”
Eighty percent of those surveyed said they never drink tap water, but surprisingly none said they worried about the safety of their public drinking water.
“I just think the tap water tastes really bad down here,” said Beth Reinmiller. “I always drink bottled because of it.
Although the $10 billion bottled water industry has helped stimulate a healthier lifestyle in the U.S., the Container Recycling Institute says that 86 percent of water bottles become litter or end up in landfills instead of recycling bins. In addition to the waste, 1.5 million barrels [Correction: 15 million barrels] of oil are used to create a year’s worth of bottles.
Janet Larson of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said that even though bottled water is a relatively new global industry, its environmental problem lies in the fact that it has been growing at an extremely fast rate.
“The beverage consumption has been growing at better than 10 percent a year,” said Larson. “People have a lack of confidence in tap and are lured in with the advertisements of mountains and glaciers on commercials and think they are getting something much better.”
Larson also said that some west coast cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have quit providing bottled water as a government service because of the arising environmental problems with the plastic.
“They were simultaneously trying to combat environmental problems and also providing bottled water at functions,” said Larson. “It just didn’t make sense.”
One truth that many forget is that most bottled water comes from a tap and undergoes less stringent regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency than public water systems.
A 1999 study from the Natural Resources Defense Council study determined that one-third of 103 brands studied did not comply with the industry-set standards.
“If someone would have told me in the 70s that bottled water would be sold, I wouldn’t have believed them,” said South Walton resident Brit Gibson. “I drink majority of tap water because its supposed to be purified.”
But even with the environmental implications and no proven benefit over tap, the bottle looks to be here to stay because of its taste.
“I can’t drink the water here,” said Johnnie Warren. “Sometimes it smells like a swimming pool.”
http://story.waltonsun.com/article.display.db.php?a=2276
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