Bottled isn’t better

By now most of us know how bad plastic water bottles are for the environment. Next to plastic bags, bottles are one of the most talked about landfill items. But what about the water that fills those plastic bottles? Is it really worth the trouble, not to mention the price, of bottling what is essentially tap water?

Your average 12-ounce bottle of water costs $1 or more, depending on the brand, which, as we all know, is terribly important. Drinking water from the tap in Portland will cost you about 1 cent for four gallons. A humble English major like myself dares not even attempt to calculate the markup on that.

So what is it that makes the water in the bottle so much more special and, therefore, so much more expensive? As many of the water bottling companies will tell you, its specialness comes from the source.

To describe their water, companies often use adjectives such as “crisp,” “pure” and “delicious.” These words imply that their water is more crisp, pure or delicious than other waters. Arrowhead, for example, gathers its water from 13 different sources in California and British Columbia.

They also differentiate between spring water, distilled water and drinking water. The only difference here is the source, yet the purification processes are almost identical. Incidentally, their Web site also offers their water in 13 different bottles and containers. One of them even claims to be better for the environment because it uses less plastic. Aw, how very nice of them.

So the source for Portland’s drinking water must be relatively dirty and undesirable seeing as how it’s so inexpensive, right?

The primary source for Portland’s drinking water is the Bull Run Watershed. Bull Run, a federally owned and protected forest reserve, gets most of its water from rainfall-about 130 inches a year. It may not be a spring, but it sounds pretty good to me. So it must be the filtering process that provides bottled water with its relative crispness, right?

It turns out that all water given to the public must meet the same EPA standards. The EPA gives federally mandated maximum allowances for metals such as mercury, lead and a whole list of other possible contaminants. The water analysis reports from the Portland Water Bureau and Arrowhead are almost identical. So what, besides the price, is the difference between the two beverages?

It seems to me the difference is like that between a mint chocolate chip ice cream with green food coloring and one that isn’t dyed but tastes the same–it’s all in your head.

Surprisingly, to me anyway, PSU is the No. 1 source of bottled water consumption in Oregon. Do people think that water downtown is dirty? Or that water fountains are gross? Hopefully the aforementioned facts about our city water have rid the reader of any such idea. So it would seem that the only thing that makes the bottled water taste better is the bottle. A bottle that makes things better only to those who profit from bottling a product that really costs a quarter-cent per gallon; a bottle that hurts the environment, not to mention your bottom line.

So the next time you walk by a Benson Bubbler on your way to buy a bottle of water, remember what you’re paying for–the mint that’s already in your mint chocolate chip.

And if you really can’t resist buying that oh-so-fresh-and-crisp bottle of water, please have the common courtesy to recycle or, even better, reuse the bottle. There’s really no excuse.