My (unaired) Perspective on bottled water

On 25 April 2008, I wrote the following Perspective on bottled water to be submitted to my local NPR station, which runs one Perspective written and spoken by a local listener every morning. Sadly, it has yet to have been selected, but that doesn't mean I can't post it here! Enjoy:

I fell for it: the cool images on the labels, the pristine-sounding locales from where it comes. I used to actually believe bottled water was better than tap water. The marketing teams of bottled water companies are doing a commendable job, so much so that Americans are drinking 4 million bottles of water an hour. The world diverts 1.5 million barrels of oil each year to fuel this addiction. Even so, of the 2.7 million tons of plastic used to make bottles, only 13% is recycled. This means that the remaining 87% will either sit in a landfill for thousands of years or enter natural habitats, where it can kill wildlife. If that’s not enough, bottled water is a lot more expensive than tap water. At my school, a bottle of water costs $1.00 from the vending machine. This is thousands of times more expensive than the water from my tap at home.

The ads have us convinced that tap water is dirty, not to be trusted, and not nearly as crisp and refreshing as that of the bottled variety. But the fact is: It just isn’t. There are hundreds of regulators with the EPA whose job it is to maintain the very high standards to which our municipal water is held. On the other hand, bottled water is regulated by the FDA, which holds it to much more lax standards and employs very few people to enforce them. Many bottled water sources are actually just municipal taps.

The Bay Area’s tap water is among the best in the world; it comes straight from Sierra snowmelt. It’s the type of water bottled water companies try to emulate in their advertising. Considering the number of people around the world who sicken and die as a result of not even having access to clean water, it is offensive to think we are too good for our own tap water. So, instead of using a bottle a day, use a reusable bottle. They are very much in vogue for students nowadays, with the ubiquitous colored hard plastic bottles, each with bumper stickers and permanent pen markings, or the Swiss-imported aluminum containers with artistic designs setting each off from the other. Our tap water is cleaner, better-regulated, better for the environment, and much less expensive than bottled water; it just doesn’t make sense to keep up this addiction. Plus, in the end tap water is just as refreshing.