In Bottled Water We Trust

Bottled water is a defining aspect of the era in which we live. Comedians make jokes about the absurdities of paying an inflated price for water…

I guess it’s true that one of the reasons North Americans buy bottled water is simply that it is marketed to them. I jokingly marketed a line of t-shirts and buttons promoting the candidacy of Dick Cheney for President last year and actually sold a few items.

But marketing alone doesn’t explain the phenomenon of bottled water. I think that insecurity also has a lot to do with its popularity. In the United States, the government is looking out for you regardless of whether you get your water from a bottle or the tap. What is really interesting about this is that the standards and the oversight are completely different. The EPA is responsible for the safety of your municipal tap water and the FDA is responsible for what you get in a bottle. I am too lazy to do the research to see which agency is more reviled by conspiracy theorists, but regardless, the most basic fact is that Americans enjoy access to clean drinking water with very few exceptions.

I have lived in Canada for most of my life. Water is one of the resources that Canada is renowned for but most of us still remember one terrible incident of municipal water contamination. What happened in Walkerton, Ontario in 2000 shook the confidence of the entire nation. I suspect that bottled water sales increased a lot as a result. I continued to drink tap water after the Walkerton incident.

When we moved to Malta we drank bottled water. The municipal tap water was desalinated seawater and the sodium content was pretty high. It tasted awful. I didn’t like buying liter after liter of water in disposable bottles and we switched to a service with returnable 20 liter bottles as soon as we got settled in.

Our move to Tunisia has presented many challenges. Finding a safe and PlasticLess drinking water source had to take a backseat to many of these challenges. I felt like a hypocrite drinking water out of 1.5 liter plastic water bottles while writing a blog about reducing plastic consumption. I couldn’t find a water delivery service. I couldn’t find a Brita pitcher. I couldn’t get any assurances that the tap water was safe for me and my family to drink. We all had a bout or two of GI upset during our first month here. I gave up actively looking for an alternative to bottled water and simply hoped that one would present itself.

Last week I took the family on a trip to Florence, Italy. I was very pleased to find that our favorite hostel provides its guests with cold drinking water from a filtering dispenser. We refilled the water bottles that we brought from Africa about a dozen times. This great alternative to bottled water reminded me of our predicament at home. I was able to buy a Brita pitcher at a pharmacy in Florence.

We are still a bit worried about micro flora in our tap water. We did a taste test of boiled, cooled and filtered water. It kinda sucked. We are now executing plan B. Catherine and I are drinking water poured into the Brita straight from the tap. The kids are being supplied with bottled water while we wait to see if our guts are sufficiently acclimatized to the local bacteria.

As far a plastic consumption goes, the plastic pitcher and it’s recyclable filters will reduce ours by about a dozen bottles per week depending on the weather.