The Problem with Bottled Water

Bottled water in parks - it's so convenient to have handy. It provides an easily portable method of hydration for park visitors when there is no potable water supply available. It's much healthier for people to drink water instead of sugar-laden softdrinks. Bottled water solves all kinds of problems when it comes to supplying safe, healthy drinking water to park users. What's not to like about bottled drinking water? Plenty, according to a collection of national conservation and health organizations.

So, Just What Is the Problem?

First, putting drinking water into disposable plastic bottles consumes an enormous amount of energy to produce, package and transport. The energy consumed is estimated to be the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil annually. The Riverkeeper, a national conservation organization based in New York, compares the energy needed to transport, chill and collect empty disposable bottles to be equivalent to filling each bottle one-quarter full of oil. Second, the production of disposable plastic water bottles uses nearly 3 million tons of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic per year.

But wait, there's more. While the bottles are touted as being fully recyclable, more than 85 percent of empty plastic water bottles end up in landfills, or worse, are incinerated, releasing toxic chemicals into the air. Discarded disposable water bottles are the unwelcome byproduct of bottled water, and our parks, streets and rivers become the recipient of a large percentage of these disposable bottles, causing environmental impacts to natural resources and unsightly public spaces.

The vast majority of bottled water is considered safe, but there are some nagging questions raised about the health implications of bottled water. A study by the Natural Resources Defense Council found some samples of 103 bottled water brands tested violated strict state water-quality standards for chemical or bacterial contamination. More recently, a concern has grown about the presence of phthalates, a suspected endocrine disrupter found in the plastic of water bottles. Some believe that pthalates might leach into the drinking water.

There Is an Alternative

Proponents of using public and municipal drinking water instead of bottled water note that the cost of producing safe, clean, public drinking water is far, far cheaper than bottled water, in many cases hundreds, if not thousands of times...