Convenience

A very obvious difference between tap and bottled water: Bottled water comes in a bottle.  That single factor alone helps make it marketable because of the convenience factor. People can easily pick it up while on the go. After all, few people want to fill up reusable bottles at dirty gas station bathrooms or search for a working water fountain. Instead, they appreciate the more consistent quality of bottled water compared to tap water, which changes from one city the next.

The portability of bottled water imparts many important benefits. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes the value of commercially bottled water for Americans traveling overseas because tap water is often of questionable quality in many places. Indeed, Americans attending Olympic Games in China should drink the bottled water provided by bottled water companies from western nations. After all, consumer demand in the west produces much higher quality water than that of less developed nations. Moreover, the CDC underscores the value of keeping bottled water on hand to prevent dehydration during summer activities in any place.

The replacements for portability that environmentalists suggest won’t always meet our needs. For example, environmental activists suggest that we can easily make tap water as portable as commercially bottled water by using refillable bottles. Yet this undermines the convenience factor that makes bottled water so valuable. One must remember to lug along a refillable bottle. Refillable bottles could easily get lost, and they must be kept clean. Also, a refillable bottle with warm water in your car is not as appetizing as stopping by a convenience store to get a refrigerated version. Activists don’t address the issue of where these bottles will be refilled on the road. Water fountains are not always available, and often the only option is a public bathroom, which is often unsanitary and certainly not a pleasant option for many people.

Refillable bottles are fine as long as people keep them clean, which in some cases may be a tall order especially if people haul them around and store them in cars. Coffey Laboratories in Portland Ore., conducted tests on refillable bottles used by a sample of individuals to see if they contacted significant bacteria. Tests showed that many contained considerable levels of bacteria—even bottles that were washed pretty regularly. Bottles contained bacteria ranging from 99 colonies up to 4,100 for a bottle washed a couple days before the test. A bottled washed the day before the test contained 2,400 colonies of bacteria. While these levels might not be unsafe, it shows that refillable water bottles are not trouble-free alternatives to commercially bottled water.

Their other option–reliance on water fountains–isn’t much of an answer either. But water fountains have their own set of sanitary issues. Susan Poutanen, a microbiologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto, explained to a Canadian newspaper that bacterial colonization tends to grow in wet areas like a water fountain, but the risks of illness are low. “The ideal would be to drink from the fountain without touching it and if it looks gunky then don’t use it,” she noted. (See: “Schools Say Idea to Limit Plastic Bottles Holds Water,” Winnipeg Free Press, June 23, 2008, A2.)

The advice to not use unsanitary water fountains is probably good. One 13-year-old boy in an Oregon middle school conducted a study of water fountains in his school to determine how sanitary they are compared to his school’s toilets. He found that the toilets were significantly cleaner than the water fountains. “The toilet water is usually cleaner with regard to bacteria because toilets get continuously flushed, whereas a water fountain is left open to the environment,” said Dr. Phillip Tierno of New York University Medical Center. “You know that toilets are occasionally washed, but I’ve never seen a water fountain sanitized at all.”