Tap Water vs. Bottled Water: Which Is Better?

The Cases For and Against Tap Water

Then Anne Le Strat, chairman of Eau de Paris, had a great idea. She persuaded Paris city officials to install a tap water fountain with a feature that would make the water fizzy.

Called La Pétillante, literally, She Who Sparkles, this fountain installed in the Jardin de Reuilly park in southeast Paris adds carbon dioxide bubbles to still tap water. This more interesting beverage was made available for free to passers by. Installed at a cost of €75,000 (US $110,000), the fountain delivers warm, still tap water, or chilled tap water with bubbles.

Le Strat's idea worked. In just the first year, sales of home carbonation machines more than doubled as French people seized the opportunity to turn virtually free tap water into a tastier environmentally friendly drink. But does tap water have to be turned into fizzy water to make it a superior choice to bottled water?

Tap Water Can Be Delicious or Deadly

Certain cities are famous for the quality of their tap water. Restaurants in New York City and Vienna, for instance, frequently serve tap water to their customers. The cities of Los Angeles and Clearbrook, British Columbia provide tap water that has won top prizes at international water tastings. And the makers of Aquafina and Dasani bottled water like their sources of tap water so well that they simply take tap water and put it in bottles for the convenience of their customers.

In the United States, some cities have seasonal problems with their water supplies. Algae feeding on  dairy cattle manure, for instance, contaminate the water in Waco, Texas during the late fall and early spring. Waco tap water can take on a distinctly barnyard flavor when cold fronts cause surface water to sink and bottom water to rise in the lake providing the city's municipal water supply. Blue-green algae associated with livestock manures are a problem during hot weather in small towns and cities in America's Plains States.

In the western United States and Australia, tap water becomes unacceptably saline during the summer. In some locations, natural fluorides so completely contaminate city well water that not only do residents not get cavities, their teeth become mottled brown with crystalline deposits dentists cannot remove.

And in much of the world, tap water simply is not safe to drink. Water may not be treated before it is pumped into the public water distribution system, or old pipes or broken pipes near sewage conduits may introduce contamination into the system. But water-borne danger is not limited to the Third World:

• In 1993, over 400,000 people became sick, and some died, when the Milwaukee, Wisconsin municipal water supply became contaminated with an organism known as Cryptosporidium.
• In 2002, American scientists announced that they had identified 82 pharmaceutical compounds in lakes and streams.
• Numerous studies have found water supplies to be contaminated with estrogen-like BPA compounds.
• Between 2014 and 2019, residents of Flint, Michigan, were (in)famously exposed to lead, as well as possibly Legionella bacteria, through the city water supply. Although the crisis was eventually solved, it took years of complaints for action to be taken, and up to 12,000 children were chronically exposed to dangerously high lead levels in the process.

There is also a problem with the chlorine used to kill germs in water. Some scientists theorize that chlorine in tap water may compete for receptor sites on the thyroid gland that would otherwise absorb iodine for making thyroid hormone, with diminished thyroid hormone production the result. Modern tap water is a miracle when compared to the water supplies of cities in the disease-ridden historical past, but it certainly is not without its problems.

The Case For and Against Bottled Water

In all but a very few parts of the world, bottled water is reliably free of disease-causing microbes and toxic pollutants, at least when the water is put into the bottle. Water stored in glass bottles is generally safe even when stored without temperature control or for years at a time, although bubbly water may go flat. Most countries offer a financial incentive to make sure glass is recycled.

Plastic water bottles, however, pose a special problem for consumers. Most plastic containers for water are made with a chemical called bisphenol-A, or BPA. Leaching out of the plastic in the bottle, BPA can disrupt the action of many different kinds of hormones. Over 200 scientific studies have found that exposure to BPA results in:

• Earlier puberty in females and smaller testicles in males.
• Birth defects causing malformed penises in male babies and menstruation in girls as young as the age of six.
• Greater addictive effects of the brain chemical dopamine, increasing urges for eating, sex, gambling, and risky behaviors.
• Weight gain due to failure of thyroid hormone to be transformed into its active form.
• Feminization of male behaviors.
• Erectile dysfunction.

BPA is most likely to leach out of plastics when they are exposed to acid or heat. This means that adding a fruit juice powder to water in a plastic water bottle (adding acid) or storing a water bottle in a car (adding heat) can cause the chemical to leach out of the plastic and into the water inside it.

The European Union and a few cities in the USA have now banned the use of BPA in baby bottles. Bottled water for adults usually comes in containers that are still made with BPA. The presence of toxins in the plastic water bottles, however, is just part of the problem. Recycling or disposing of the trash generated by plastic water bottles is an enormous logistical problem.

While the French generate 220,000 tons of trash from water bottles each year, Americans put 1.5 million tons of used plastic water bottles in the trash every year. That doesn't count the 500,000 tons of plastic water bottles that don't make it into a trash can. So many plastic water bottles wind up in the ocean that a vast swirling eddy of plastic garbage larger than the American state of Texas has formed in the Pacific Ocean, and a slightly smaller area some scientists call a "plastic soup" has formed in the Atlantic Ocean. These floating garbage dumps kill wildlife and may even alter the weather.

What Can Consumers Do?

There will always be times bottled water is a necessity. If your city's water system goes out, you should not deprive yourself of water just because you can't afford Pellegrino or Perier in their well-known green bottles. However, you can save money and protect the environment by buying a steel thermos bottle for carrying your daily drinking water, and a filter for your tap to make tap water tastier and more aesthetically pleasing, as well as safer. Water filters can reduce the amount of chlorine and organic chemicals, and some filters are even able to remove lead from the water. As well as offering a safer solution for your tap water, these filters can even render water from ponds and rivers safe in survival situations — and they are, as such, a must-have for campers and hikers. Filtering water with high-quality filtering systems is, in many ways, the golden middle road. Neither unfiltered tap water nor bottled water, but filtered tap water, could be the safest, tastiest, and more environmentally friendly choice.

When you have to buy bottled water, look for local brands. They don't have to be shipped from the other side of the world for your drinking pleasure. Whenever possible, drink rain water bottled locally. It contains small amounts of minerals your body needs (or your plants need), and it comes from a renewable source.