Bottled Water: Do Brands Have Something To Hide When It Comes To Purity?

Mostly gone are the images of pristine mountain lakes from advertisers trying to get health-conscious consumers (usually moms) to believe that their water is the purest. Today, the push is more toward showing bottled water as a rejuvenating sports drink promoted by athletes.

Despite all the hype, questions still remains, including how clean and healthy are bottled water products compared to tap water, and are they worth the money?

Image courtesy of CartoonStock.com.A survey over the last few years by Food and Water Watch “documented bottled water prices ranging from $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon,” compared to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that tap water costs about $0.002 per gallon, on average, nationwide.”

So is all bottled water the same and worth the money?

To find out the answers to these questions, the Environmental Working Group ran its second ever annual survey to see how forthcoming bottled water companies are about the quality of their products.

The EWG surveyed the labels of 173 different bottled water products to see if they disclosed information about their water sources; purification methods; and purity testing results – not much to ask if you’re not hiding anything.

Overall, over half the brands failed the EWG’s transparency test. The worst offender was Whole Foods’ Italian Still Mineral Water, which found its way to the bottom of the heap. The company doesn’t provide any of the basic information about the water on the labels or the website.

Other offenders included Giant’s Acadia Natural Spring Water and CVS’s Gold Emblem Natural Spring Water, which gave customers no way to learn about their water purity.

On the flipside, the companies providing the best transparency of their operations were: Gerber Pure Purified Water, Nestle Pure Life Purified Water, and Penta Ultra-Purified Water. Each earned the highest marks for labeling their water sources, treatment methods, and online water purity reports.

Since this was the second year that the EWG did the survey, they did expect to see a larger percentage of companies showing improvement in their transparency, but this wasn’t the case. In its report, the EWG found that “some brands disclosed even less information in 2010 than in 2009, and only a fraction were more open.”

 So who regulates bottled drinking water?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates bottle water as a food, and if you’re wondering, the EPA regulates tap water.

Be warned! The FDA says that its regulations “require that bottled water be safe and that it be processed, bottled, held, and transported under sanitary conditions,” but there’s a kicker. The agency also says that because its “experience over the years has shown that bottled water has a good safety record, bottled water plants generally are assigned low priority for inspection.”

This basically means consumers beware. Take your own proactive approach to making sure the bottled water you buy is safe.

Need more drinking water safety tips?

Except for stocking up on bottled water for emergencies, the EWG recommends that people stick with drinking filtered tap water. Carbon filters (pitchers or faucet-mounted) are affordable and reduce many common contaminants such as lead, and chemicals used in the municipal disinfection process of tap water.

If you can afford it, install a reverse osmosis water filter to remove containments that carbon water filters can’t. Reverse osmosis water filters can remove contaminants including: fluoride (which can damage an infant’s developing teeth), arsenic, and chromium-6 (a cancer causing agent).

Finally, if you’re on the go, a useful piece of advice is to carry stainless steel or other bisphenol-A(BPA) free bottles. Hard plastic bottles (number seven plastics) can leach harmful chemicals, including BPAs, into the water you drink.

Reader comments and input are always welcomed!