BOTTLED WATER VERSUS TAP WATER
BOTTLED V. TAP WATER
Study finds tap water safer, cheaper
BOTTLED WATER STANDARDS
Water's still roiled over what's 'natural spring water'
BOTTLED WATER STANDARDS
Just how safe is filtered water?
BOTTLED V. TAP WATER
Study finds tap water safe, cheaper
Los Angeles Daily News - 5/4/01
By Joseph Giordono, staff writer
Never mind worries about the "Big One," a new study Thursday rocks the very foundation of Los Angeles' lifestyle: bottled water is no healthier than tap water.
A study by researchers in Geneva, Switzerland, found no evidence that a $2 bottle of water shipped to L.A. from remote mountains and tropical islands is any better for you than plain tap water.
The World Wildlife Fund, which commissioned the study, conceded that bottled water might taste better than some from the tap, but said it's not healthier or safer. In one clear way it's worse: the production and discard of so many bottles is polluting the environment.
"When you compare public drinking water supplies with bottled water in the United States, you come to the same conclusion," said Jim McDaniel, director of water quality at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
"Public water is a great deal, it's just as safe and it's a heck of a lot cheaper," he said.
Bottled water is the fastest-growing beverage industry in the world, with up to $22 billion in U.S. sales alone, the study found.
The study also pointed out that some 1.5 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water every year, releasing toxic chemicals and crowding landfills.
"Bottled water may be no safer, or healthier, than tap water in many countries, while selling for up to 1,000 times the price," the study found.
But as long as the likes of "chromium 6," "MTBE" and "arsenic" continue to be associated with drinking water in Los Angeles, many consumers say they will gladly continue to pay for bottled water.
"What are you, suicidal?" exclaimed Luins Williams Jr., who combined the Southland's fixation on designer labels and healthy lifestyles by putting corporate logos and other specialized labels on water bottles.
"Would you really take a glass, put it under the tap where you live and drink that? The city puts chlorine in it, but other than that it's still filthy."
Williams, who says his Premier Label Water Co. was the first bottled water company to take Internet orders, counts several big names as satisfied clients.
Thanks to him, everyone from Warner Bros. Studios to Microsoft to Sally Jesse Raphael to even the Los Angeles Department of Health have their own private label waters. And, yes, Williams has done labels for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
His latest label is a "Designated Driver" label, aimed at bars and clubs.
Other water industry figures challenged the WWF study as well.
"Bottled water sales are a symptom of the problem, not the cause itself," said Stephen Kay, a spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association in Virginia.
"Standards for bottled water are at least as protective as those for tap water."
But the World Wildlife Fund study concluded that standards for tap water are often more stringent than for bottled water.
A spokeswoman at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., confirmed that tap water is under the purview of the EPA while bottled waters are considered a food product and subject to FDA guidelines.
Environmental activists say that while local water might not be clean enough to be trusted, there are other, lower-cost alternatives to bottled water.
"We run the tap through a filter at my house," said Gail Ruderman-Feuer, wife of City Councilman Mike Feuer and a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has done studies on both bottled water and tap water in the United States.
"There are problems with both. With bottled water, there is very little regulation. It could come from a spring in an industrial area. With tap water, one of the biggest problems is arsenic, which has national attention now."
The bottom line, Ruderman-Feuer said, is that consumers should be wary of both products.
"The lesson is, even if you are paying a lot for water, you don't know if it is safe," she said.
BOTTLED WATER STANDARDS
Water's still roiled over what's 'natural spring water'
Sacramento Bee - 4/14/01
By Chris Bowman, staff writer
As Tonya Clark imagines it, the "mountain spring water" she buys by the case at Sam's Club is bottled right where it gurgles up from the earth in some misty alpine forest far from civilization.
"It kinda like bubbles out of the ground, nice and pure, untouched by humans," said Clark, a dental hygienist who usually totes a pint to lunch in midtown Sacramento. "I picture somebody up there with a bucket, or dipping bottles into this spring."
Several California bottlers actually get their "mountain spring water" quite differently:
"Just push the button here, and in two minutes it will come out," David Dashiell said during a tour of his plumbing works near Interstate 80 in the Sierra Nevada east of Colfax.
Water from a series of five gouged-out springs flows through a network of PVC pipes to a giant stainless-steel tank. Tasteless ozone gas, rather than chlorine, is added to kill germs.
Press the green button at the concrete filling station and, 14 minutes later, a tanker-truck is loaded with 6,400 gallons ready to haul to bottling plants in Sacramento, the Bay Area, Modesto, Fresno and Los Angeles. The water is then bottled under several different brands.
The scenario bursts the bucolic bubbles cultivated by many bottled water labels of snowy peaks and imaginative prose.
"It's not so romantic," Clark said upon learning the industrial reality behind the mountain splendor depicted on her beverage. "The picture that they show is really quite deceiving."
What the millions of gourmet water consumers think they are buying and what they're actually drinking is an issue of growing debate among bottlers pitching their water as "pure" or "natural."
As the bottled water market has soared, the war over words and images has intensified, particularly among the purveyors of "mountain spring water."
Water that sprouts from the depths of Mother Earth carries such cachet with consumers that they pay an average of 15 percent more for it over bottled "drinking water," which is mostly municipal water minus the chlorine and harmless impurities, according to bottled water industry experts.
Industry-sponsored laws have forced state and federal food and drug regulators into refereeing truth-in-labeling disputes that have little or no bearing on public health but critically influence the price bottlers can command.
The federal Food and Drug Administration's definition of "spring water" has been expanded three times in as many decades to accommodate big bottlers seeking to increase water production.
In the global arena, industry representatives from 55 countries have been wrangling for the past six years over a World Trade Organization definition that will allow spring water to be marketed as widely around the world as natural mineral water.
"We're almost there," said Henry Hidell, an international consultant for beverage companies.
A settlement approved Friday in one of the biggest spring water squabbles yet did nothing to clarify the waters.
The agreement resolves allegations in a consumers' class-action lawsuit that Great Spring Waters of America and Crystal Geyser Water Co. in the past six years "falsely or deceptively" represented products as "spring water" when those products failed to meet or consistently meet the government definition, despite certifications to the contrary by the California Department of Health Services.
The lawsuit, lodged in San Francisco Superior Court, accused the bottlers of misleading the public about the geologic and geographic sources of their "mountain spring water." It also alleged that the companies misrepresented on labels and advertisements the "purity and healthfulness" of the spring water, but did not claim the water was unsafe to drink.
The lawsuit targeted three brands: Calistoga Mountain Spring Water and Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water, owned by Great Spring Waters, and Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water.
Crystal Geyser did not agree to the $9.7 million settlement.
"Our water is genuine spring water," said Nancy Davis, consumer service manager for Crystal Geyser, which bottles water at its springs in Weed, on the western slope of Mount Shasta, and in Olancha, on the high desert floor of the Owens Valley in Southern California.
Great Spring Waters, a subsidiary of the Perrier Group of America, admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to give California consumers long-term price breaks on Arrowhead and Calistoga brands.
"While Great Spring Waters of America believes that the lawsuit is without merit, we nevertheless take these allegations very seriously," the company said in a prepared statement.
The company agreed to donate $950,000 annually in water or cash for five years to nonprofit groups or government agencies that provide disaster relief or health support, or promote conservation of natural resources.
It also agreed to offer at least $1 million a year in product discounts for the next five years.
"Consumers were overpaying for water because it wasn't spring water," contended Robert Jaret, one of the lawyers who filed the suit.
In the heat of the legal sparing, the company added fine print on its bottles indicating that some of its water comes from regions other than those suggested on its labels -- the Napa Valley, famous for its vineyards, and the popular Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains.
The settlement approved by Superior Court Judge Stuart Pollak, however, did not resolve whether the products in question are bona fide spring water.
The question was simply too riddled with conflicting opinions from expert geologists on both sides of the case, Jaret said.
Everyone agrees, however, that a spring must originate from groundwater and cannot be directly influenced by rain, runoff or other surface water that can percolate the ground and muddy the spring water. To guard against that happening, the settlement requires Great Spring Waters to routinely sample the clarity of its water at the source.
Dashiell's springs was one of 50 sources of bottled spring water that lawyers and geologists in the lawsuit inspected.
His operation became suspect in the mid-1990s after a competitor complained to state authorities that the water feeding his springs is mostly leakage from a hydroelectric canal uphill of his plant. Dashiell said he recently spent more than $100,000 to line 3,000 feet of the canal with concrete to defend his claims about the origins of the water.
"It's worth the peace of mind," he said.
The fuss over spring water is rooted in ancient beliefs of the magical and healing powers of water that springs from the ground under its own force, typically through faults and fissures in rock, said Francis Chapelle, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who has written a history on springs.
"Marketers of bottled water tap into that mystique. They know this almost unconscious reverence for spring water is there, and they use it to sell water," he said.
Most bottlers pump aquifers feeding the spring through wells that are hundreds and even thousands of feet from the mouth of the spring. The method is more economical, and ensures a steady and more voluminous flow. And they contend the water is exactly the same as the water that emerges naturally to the surface.
The minority of bottlers who collect the water directly at the mouth of springs insist theirs is an environmentally kinder method of extraction as it does not run the risk of running the spring dry.
Some even contend the water from the mouth is better tasting.
"Spring water is sweeter and crisper because it has been filtered through hundreds of feet of rock," said William Sullivan, who claims in a separate lawsuit that his Lake County company, Cobb Mountain Spring Water Co., was driven out of business by the larger bottlers. "If you are pumping, you are pulling in minerals, sediment and other things you wouldn't get from the natural flow."
BOTTLED WATER STANDARDS
Just how safe is filtered water?
San Jose Mercury News - 4/14/01
BY K. Oanh Ha, staff writer
It's the end of the workday. Customers stream in and out of K Video & Water, carrying plastic jugs, not videocassettes. Opposite the shelves of Cambodian-language films is an unusual fixture: faucets.
The jugs are empty when customers enter and full of water when they leave.
The East San Jose store is one of dozens peddling tap water that's been filtered for 15 to 35 cents a gallon. They capitalize on a niche market: immigrants who don't trust tap water and can't afford bottled water that costs four times as much in supermarkets.
California law requires the stores to be regulated by the Department of Health Services to ensure health and safety. But more than half of at least 69 water stores opened in Santa Clara County in the past decade are selling water without the required state license and supervision, according to a Mercury News review of city business licenses.
Until this week, the state agency responsible for water stores had not conducted any inspections in Santa Clara County since 1997 -- offering consumers no protection that the water they're paying for is better or safer than tap water, according to state records. After the Mercury News inquired about the lack of inspections, however, the agency on Thursday inspected two water stores, including one that had been operating without a license for at least three years.
The lack of oversight comes as more stores are opening. More than one third of the stores have begun operating since 1998, after regular investigations stopped, according to business license records.
The neglect exists despite problems found in nearly one quarter of the stores inspected in the mid-1990s. In some cases, lead and bacteria were found at levels that would prompt water municipalities to send out warnings to consumers if it had been tap water.
``The growth of the industry has . . . exceeded our ability to keep up,'' said Jim Waddell, who oversees water stores as acting chief of food safety at the Food and Drug Branch of the state's Department of Health Services. ``We have to do catch as catch can.''
Though no reports of illness have been linked to the stores, water industry experts warn that a badly-maintained or flawed system can dispense water no better than tap or, worse, introduce potentially harmful bacteria or chemicals.
``If it's not properly maintained, it can produce water of lower quality than tap,'' said Wayland Ho, a Food and Drug investigator for the Department of Health Services who inspected water stores until 1997. ``Like a clogged filter, it can throw back contaminants into the water.''
Most water stores run the city's tap water through filters that improve its taste, stripping it of minerals and the disinfectant chlorine. In San Jose and other Silicon Valley cities such as Fremont, Milpitas and Santa Clara, where water stores are a common sight, many unsuspecting consumers falsely believe the stores are operating legally with government control.
``The government oversees these stores,'' said a confident Jose Canela, as he walked out of New World Laundry and Water in San Jose with a five-gallon bottle. ``We're paying for the water, so they have to. If they're not doing it, the government is making a mistake.''
Canela, a Mexico native, started buying water from the shops five years ago because he thinks it's better for his three children. He began buying water from the shops after watching a television report about chemicals added to tap water.
The shops have a large customer base, many of them immigrants from developing countries where residents don't drink the tap water if they can avoid it.
Water experts, however, say local tap water is perfectly safe. In fact, California's tap water standards are among the strictest in the country.
Public water municipalities in Santa Clara County provide ``very good quality tap water,'' said Catherine Ma, North Coastal Regional Engineer within Department of Health Services, which monitors tap water quality.
But such assurances are not enough for people like Diana Sun. A Taiwanese immigrant who didn't drink tap water in her home country, Sun buys water from a Cupertino store weekly. She and others complain of the chlorine taste and the particles they see in tap water.
Some experts criticize water bottlers and water shop owners for preying on people's misperceptions and paranoia. ``It's unfortunate people are spending money on purified water,'' said Liz Applegate, a nutrition professor at University of California at Davis. ``Their money would go further if they bought a big bag of beans and vegetables. They really would . . . get more nutrition out of it.''
The store owners, however, say they're simply providing a product people want, at very reasonable prices.
``Everybody knows that tap water isn't too good,'' said Tim Ta, owner of Pacific Pure Water, which has been in business for a decade. ``This water is much better for you.''
The stores are stiff competition for big bottled water companies, such as Evian and Crystal Geyser. In California, water stores make up 10 percent to 12 percent of the bottled water market, said Kent Hill, president of the California Bottled Water Association.
Most water shops are mom-and-pop operations, often run by immigrants who speak little English themselves. On a busy summer day, a store may sell 700 to 1,000 gallons of water.
Water shops are a low priority for the Department of Health Services because of staffing shortages and the presumption that stores are selling a relatively safe product that meets state and federal health standards, said Waddell of the Department of Health Services.
The state has a list of 23 stores that have applied for licenses, haven't yet received them but are nonetheless operating illegally -- some for years. ``We recognize these guys aren't operating lawfully,'' said Waddell. ``We need to follow up on that, and we intend to do it.''
Before the state issues a license, it must approve the shop's water processing system. This ensures the store is using food-grade equipment and not jerry-rigging plumbing that could leach lead and other toxic metals into the vended water. Stores must renew their licenses yearly and submit bacteriology tests every six months.
The state licensing procedure is a confusing process for many operators. While some say they have no idea they need to be licensed at all, many are unclear on how to get and maintain a license.
Ta, owner of Pacific Pure Water, for example, said the Department of Health Services first came to inspect and test his water before he opened for business a decade ago. ``You don't have to do tests every year, only when the state requests it,'' he said. ``I think they send you something if there are complaints.''
K Video & Water, which has been selling water since 1995, according to the owner, is also currently unlicensed. Department of Health Services officials say the store has applied for a license but has not submitted everything required to receive one. ``I don't know anything about the law,'' said the store owner, who declined to give his name. ``If the health department needs anything, they contact me.''
Inspection reports by the Department of Health Services between 1993 and 1997, when regular investigations were conducted, showed at least 5 of the 21 shops visited had problems. Two stores tested positive for lead at levels exceeding what's considered safe in tap water while another tested positive for coliform bacteria at a level that would make tap water unsafe to drink. Coliform is an indicator that the water may be contaminated by fecal matter. Chloroform, a potentially carcinogenic chemical, was found at one store.
Investigators inspecting San Jose's P&J Senter Pure Water in 1996 found the store had numerous problems, including a wastewater outlet that drained out of a hose into standing water in a sink, potentially contaminating the water. Lab tests showed the shop's water failed a coliform bacteria test -- at a level more than twice the standard. After correcting the cited problems, the store's water tested clean.
Though no reports of illness were attributed to these incidents, epidemiologists say consumers could get sick from bad water and not even know it. In healthy individuals, the bacteria could cause diarrhea and other stomach problems that would go away in a few days -- ``illnesses that can fly under the radar of public health officials,'' said Jack Colford, an epidemiologist at University of California at Berkeley's School of Public Health.
Health officials advise consumers not to buy water from unlicensed vendors. Consumers should ask to see the shop's license and most recent test results.
Investigators nowadays are most likely to inspect a store only after a complaint, health officials say. However, many consumers of the water are immigrants, many with limited English skills, who are often surprised to hear the shops are regulated at all.
``It tastes good and looks clean,'' said Irene Garcia, a pregnant homemaker, as she loaded filled bottles of water into her car. ``I think it's safe.''
