Buy what you want.
Go ahead.
But three headlines here:
Tap water's fine.
Bottled water can be a rip-off.
What's more, it's bad for the environment.
There . . . it's out.
Sipping water from a plastic, throwaway bottle has, in the last decade or so, become a feel-good symbol of doing the right thing.
Hey, water is good for you. Most of us don't drink enough. The body needs about 2-3 liters a day, every day - as you'd guess for an adult organism of 55 to 60 percent water in the first place.
But - to quote a New Jersey Transit rider overheard recently - "How are we paying $2.50 for tap water from a plastic bottle? Man, that hustle is deep."
Deep indeed. How did we fall into the deep end?
Part of it was the triumph of marketing. Sparkling, cool, clear, pure, artesian-spring, European, upper-New-England, upper-Northwest-mountains, upper-almost-anywhere
water!
Drink, America, and be healthy!
And pay a lot for a little.
In paranoid times, the sales pitch has been: Protect thyself; thou knowest not what's in thy water. Buy bottled water and be safe. Thus bottled water joined the flim-flam of house air-filtration systems (not much good for anyone except those with extreme pulmonary or immunocompromised conditions, and even then, the systems required far exceed what you see on TV) and car alarms (good mostly for serenading city-dwellers at all hours, usually for little reason).
And we
can
, too, know what's in the water. Contrary to urban/Internet myth, tap water in the Philadelphia region is cleaner than nature's own. (Disagree? Get a straw and suck up the Schuylkill.)
Under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, local suppliers are required to submit periodic reports on purity. Guess what? New Jersey American Water, which supplies Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, Cape May and other counties, reports that levels of microbes, gases, pesticides, dissolved solids and other contaminants meet or (in most cases) exceed federal standards. That includes the anxiety-targets whose dangers in drinking water are not supported (as yet) by much good science: fluoride, uranium, lead, chlorine.
Philly tap water? Death by wetness, right? Get out: It's fine. No need to boil. That milky look you might see just after it comes out of the tap? Oxygen escaping. It settles. Poor Philly "warder": Despite good health and taste-test ratings, 20 percent of residents won't drink it ("Bottled water's backlash," Nov. 4). True, there can be corrosion with older piping - and all such issues should be reported - but as cities go, in Philadelphia the water's fine.
The FDA, not the EPA, monitors bottled water. And there are issues. Much of it is not appreciably different, or if different not appreciably better for you, than tap water. About 40 percent of bottled stuff is filtered or treated tap. The advocacy group Corporate Accountability International recently called for a telephone and e-mail blitz to get Coca-Cola Co., which makes Dasani, to publicize its source: plain old municipal water supplies.
But the problem is not just with what's inside - it's also with the bottles. As in 28 billion of them a year. As in 2 million tons of plastic, created with the use of 1.5 million barrels of oil each year.
This is bad.
And
people throw them away.
Off to landfills the bottles go - some 86 percent of them, according to the Container Recycling Institute, a pro-recycling outfit.
This is very bad.
Part of being "green" is limiting individual output of landfill fill. That means avoiding unnecessary packaging. As in the bottles (for some families, dozens per week!) enclosing the water in bottled water.
If you use, therefore, recycle - but better yet, why use at all?
If you want to triple-extra-special assure the absolute purity of your tap water, buy tap filtration devices. Or filtration pitchers. There are plenty of good, economical ones. Many refrigerators dispense filtered water.
And buy reusable bottles. Your house will stop emitting large numbers of plastic containers. And society can be a little cleaner, within and without.