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April 20, 2008
Bottled water's problems surfacing
Tap water is cheaper and may be safer, and it has no empties to load up landfills.
By Pamela LeBlanc
All over Austin, people toss back bottled water, choosing it over what comes from the faucet because they say they like the convenience, taste and purity.
Single-serving bottles of water are handed out after footraces, served at business meetings and sold in vending machines. Even municipal governments like bottled water, stocking it for thirsty city employees, emergencies and certain city-sponsored events.
As a nation, our consumption of bottled water has grown from less than 5 gallons per person in 1980 to close to 30 gallons today. Sales have increased nearly 50 percent in the past five years. We spend a collective $11.7 billion annually on bottled water when the U.S. has some of the safest, best-tasting tap water in the world.
Producing plastic bottles takes energy resources, and trucking them to stores burns fuel. The empty bottles pile up in landfills — or worse, wind up as litter in creeks and green spaces.
Reusing the bottles may not be wise, either. Some experts say that as the disposable plastic water bottles age, chemical compounds such as phthalates and bisphenol-A can leach into the water, which can disrupt human hormonal systems.
Some cities have recognized the problem. San Francisco (which was spending $500,000 a year on bottled water for city employees), Los Angeles (with a $90,000 tab) and Seattle ($58,000) have banned most city purchases of bottled water. Chicago has instituted a tax of 5 cents on every plastic bottle of water sold to offset utility costs for disposal and loss of city water revenue.
The City of Austin spends less on bottled water — an estimated $40,000 in 2007, according to a financial officer. Uses include for meetings, a few summer park events, employee recognition celebrations on City Hall Plaza and the convention center catering service. The city's water utility keeps bottles to hand out when water outages occur.
But for a city considered on the forefront of the green movement, and with Earth Day two days away, could more be done?
"I think the city clearly does need to lead by example," said Mayor Will Wynn, who said he might consider a ban on most city purchases of bottled water. "In the mayor's office, you'll get served tap water out of the mayor's sink."
The City of San Marcos said it spends more than $1,900 a year on bottled water; Round Rock spends about $4,300. The Austin school district has ordered more than 150,000 bottles this year to sell in cafeterias.
Check any park trash can, and it's obvious that people stock it at home, too. "Household expenses are escalating, yet there's this gigantic national personal expenditure on bottled water at an astronomical markup over high-quality municipal water," Wynn said.
The City of Austin charges utility customers about $3 for 1,000 gallons of drinking water. A thousand gallons of bottled water in single servings at a grocery store costs about $8,000.
For the money, the benefits are questionable. The nonprofit National Resources Defense Council tested samples of 103 brands of bottled water and found that a fourth were just tap water — sometimes further treated, sometimes not. Municipal tap water undergoes more frequent government testing than bottled water, the council said. The City of Austin describes its water quality as "excellent."
"The U.S. is the No. 1 consumer of bottled water on the globe, and yet we have some of most reliable public water systems in the world," said Deborah Lapidus, national organizer of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, which launched a movement opposing bottled water in Austin in 2007. The group conducts blind taste tests between bottled water and tap water all over the country. "For the most part, even the most avid bottled water drinkers cannot tell the difference," she said.
So what happens to all those empties? In the United States, about 15 percent of custom plastic bottles, which include water, juice, tea and sports drinks (but not soda, which is counted differently), are recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The rest — an estimated 45 billion plastic bottles a year — go into landfills or become litter. That's almost 160 plastic bottles trashed per person per year, according to the institute.
Those numbers alarmed officials in San Francisco. In 2007, the city quit buying bottled water for its 28,000 city and county employees. Officials looked at the carbon footprint of a bottle of Fiji water, once a favorite of Mayor Gavin Newsom's, that must travel 5,200 miles to reach San Francisco.
Purchasing bottled water didn't make sense in a city that prides itself on high-quality tap water from snow melt in the Sierra Mountains. City workers now sip from reusable stainless steel bottles and refill glasses at water coolers connected directly to taps. Restaurants are discouraged from selling bottled water, and the city is contemplating an ad campaign: "You thought gas was expensive? Bottled water is $9 a gallon."
On a broader scale, the Container Recycling Institute has suggested a nationwide bottle deposit law to create an incentive to recycle. Eleven states have bottle deposit laws, but only three — California, Hawaii and Maine — cover plastic water bottles.
Resistance to bottled water is spreading.
Organizers of the Austin City Limits Music Festival hand out free T-shirts to patrons who recycle water bottles and plastic beer cups. In 2007, the festival recycled 11.55 tons of plastics. And C3 Presents, the company that produces the September weekend event, recently stopped providing bottled water for its staff members, encouraging them to refill bottles with tap water instead. "That was kind of huge for us," said Jody Goode, patron services director at C3 Presents. "But it went over better than I thought."
At its recent It's My Park Day event, in which volunteers spruced up about 50 parks around the city, the nonprofit Austin Parks Foundation nixed plastic water bottles and instead provided five-gallon Thermos jugs of water. "We've been trying to wean people off of (bottled water) ... and now we're going cold turkey," said Executive Director Charlie McCabe.
Whole Foods has eliminated plastic bags in its Austin stores. But what about all that bottled water stocked on its shelves? "Our green efforts didn't start (with plastic bags) and won't stop there," said Elizabeth Smith, community relations coordinator. "We're looking at decreasing the amount of plastic used throughout our stores."
Eco-Wise, a South Austin store that sells environmentally friendly products, used to sell water in containers made of a biodegradable corn-based material, but the maker went out of business. "We went all summer without water in the store because we didn't want to sponsor more plastics being circulated," said Leesalyn Koehler, shipping and receiving manager. Now Eco-Wise sells bottled water in recyclable glass containers for $2.50 each.
Each month, Ecology Action of Texas, which operates a recycling center in downtown Austin, recycles about 6 tons of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, No. 1 plastics, which include soda and water bottles. The recycling company encourages people to keep bottles or cups at their office that they can fill at the faucet. "If you're worried about the way tap water tastes or possible impurities, put an inline filter on your home faucet," said co-director Karly Dixon.
"The average life of bottled water is 15 minutes," Dixon said. "You open it, drink it and toss it. It's an environmental nightmare."
Some facts to sip on
Americans drink more bottled water than anything else except carbonated soft drinks.
74 percent of Americans drink bottled water, and one in five drinks only bottled water.
Each year, more than 4 billion pounds of plastic bottles end up in landfills or as litter in the U.S.
Worldwide, consumers spent $100 billion on bottled water in 2005.
The total energy needed to make, transport and dispose of one bottle of water is equivalent to filling the same bottle one-quarter full of oil.
Source: Think Outside the Bottle, Beverage Marketing Corp., Natural Resources Defense Council
pleblanc@statesman.com; 445-3994
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/20/0420bottledwater.html
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