Aquafina labeled as tap water
With pressure from growing environmental concerns, PepsiCo Inc has decided to label its Aquafina bottled water with the words “Public Water Source.” Not many people are aware that Aquafina bottled waters are from purified water sourced from public reservoirs. Coca-Cola Co’s Dasani is also another bottled water that gets its water from a public reservoir. This is pretty much the same water that you can find from your tap water. Evian and Poland Spring water actually come from natural springs but they also require a lot of costs to transport the water as well as to produce the bottled water. Four out of five plastic bottles end up on landfill sites and the distribution of bottled water also involves shipping water all over the world. It is not too rare where you can often find sodas and alcohol costing the same if not cheaper than water and that is pretty ridiculous considering the abundant amount of water in the world. It is also sad to see that many parts of the world still have a hard time finding clean water to use while U.S. consumers spend up to $15 billion on bottled water last year. The big corporations have marketed bottled water as the healthy convenient way of drinking water whereas drinkable tap water is not always easy to find.
Many cities such as Minneapolis, MN, Ann Arbor, MI, San Francisco, CA, and Salt Lake City, UT have promoted banning bottled water. New York City has also recently launched an advertising campaign to promote people to drink tap water to protect the environment. Many local restaurants in San Francisco and New York are also getting rid of bottled waters and only serving tap water.
sources: Yahoo News, BBC
Jon said,
July 28, 2007 @ 4:36 pm
I myself am a Water Quality professional and I am here to show you what the difference between tap water and purified water really is.
Actually in defense of Aquafina, I performed one of my water quality tests on a bottle of aquafina just yesterday. I got a reading of 3 tds ppm (3 parts per million of total disolved solids ). The regular tap water here in the phoenix area reads 975 tds ppm on average.
Culligan water reads 6 tds ppm and arrowhead reads 130-175 tds ppm.
So even though it might come from “tap sources” the water is more pure than you will get from any other bottled water. Dasani included, as they add minerals to their water.
I think this is all just a hype by the media to downplay bottled water. When in fact bottled water really is better for you. ( although all those plastic bottles is pretty wasteful ).
What I do is I go to customer locations and I install Reverse Osmosis systems to the Customer’s Tap Water. If you wikipedia or google reverse osmosis you will understand it better.
Now here are some visual diffrences between regular tap water and filtered water.
Also so you know what is getting filtered out of tap water here are some illustrations.
I took a picture of 1 sediment filter and 2 carbon filters from an RO system prior to replacing the old filters. Here is what they look like BEFORE filtering the water.
http://img169.imagevenue.com/loc234/th_56797_06-20-07_1844325_122_234lo.jpg
And here is what the filters looked like that I took out of the RO system to replace with new ones.
http://img161.imagevenue.com/loc641/th_56799_06-20-07_1845621_122_641lo.jpg
Now after seeing what is removed from tap water over a period of 6-9 months… which would you rather drink?
here is another illustration of a new sediment filter next to a sediment filter i replaced. in this instance the old filter actually had debris coming off the side of the filter.
http://img166.imagevenue.com/loc1155/th_57121_IMAGE_00044026_122_1155lo.jpg
It is much cheaper to have a reverse osmosis system in your house, and yes you could fill up the same bottle with purified water over and over again
without going through a case of bottles every week.
But the fact is this. Municipal tap water has lead, chlorine, flouride, viruses, rust, and other debris in it.
Purified water filters and removes all of those things from the water. And bottled water is either A. Purified or B. Filtered. Therefore making bottled water healthier for you than tap water.
admin said,
July 29, 2007 @ 12:25 am
Excellent comments Jon, in a previous post, http://www.genexe.com/?p=172, I made it clear that although there are many negative things that are said about bottled waters, i don’t always 100% suggest drinking tap water because even the quality of tap water can be signficantly different depending on where you are. I know that the water in San Francisco and New York are pretty safe to drink. Using some sort of filter at home would definitely be the best thing to do. The main thing is however, that Dasani and Aquafina get their water from local public water supplies and then filter it with reverse osmosis and add minerals to it. So if you do some sort of filtering before you drink tap water, it is just as good.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003809534_aquafina28.html
Here are two links that discuss the quality of water in New York.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=728070&page=1
http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/0386.html
Thanks again for the comments!