Don't Drink the Water

Campus Report ^ | February 25, 2009 | Heather Latham

[bs9021]

Don’t Drink the Water

by: Heather Latham, February 25, 2009

Is your bottled water unsafe? Are you just as well off drinking tap water as bottled water? According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the answer to these questions may be yes.

In 1999, the NRDC did a study “of more than 1000 bottles of 103 types of bottled water from many parts of the country.” The study was done on bottled water from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas. They found that “according to government and industry estimates, about one fourth of bottled water is bottled tap water…sometimes with additional treatment, sometimes not.” They also found that regulations on bottled water are not as strict as they should be. Bottled water falls under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) while tap water falls under that of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA standards are much stricter than the FDA’s, according to this NRDC study.

The NRDC also makes a list of suggestions about how the government should move forward to correct this problem: the same strict standards should be applied to all drinking water. The NRDC suggests that the perfect long-term goal should be safe drinking water from the tap everywhere, but this reform would take a long time and a lot of money to execute...

[erikm88]

Someone forgot to tell Gavin Newsom...

[Wiseghy]

Here’s one area where I agree with some enviros.

A good filter system at your sink beats bottled water in cost, waste and “health” every time.

[TornadoAlley3]

[Indian_Fighter_Kite]

This is the filter I use :) It is cheaper and safe .

[ozzymandus]

Some college kid figures out what everybody else has known for years. No wonder they’re all leftists, they’re ignorant kids. Their teachers, however, have no excuse.

[I Buried My Guns]

Is your filter really the “ecomony” model? That is SO COOL!

[randomhero97]

bump

[tiki]

And why in the world do you think I’d listen to the NRDC environazis? I NEVER drank bottled water, I have perfectly good well water, but now that the greenies want us to stop I do buy it to take on hikes.

[ravingnutter]

I only put bottled water (and Gatorade) in hubby’s lunch cooler he takes to work, it is more about convenience than water quality. We have a whole house water filtration system on our well and then a drinking water filtration system that has its own faucet on the sink and is connected into our icemaker as well. We’ve been told by everyone who has tasted it that our tap water is better than any water they’ve ever tasted, tap or bottled.