Is water bought in a bottle better than tap water?

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Do You Think About What You Drink?

By Jim Belshaw
Of the Albuquerque Journal

It isn't often a pet theory converges with just the right amount of technological expertise to produce a good deed.
That kind of thing isn't in the nature of pet theories, not mine anyway, which tend toward the urban legend side of the hard sciences.
So when a hydrologist with worldwide experience happens to agree on a point that coincides with a dearly held theory based on no known scientific evidence, well, who can say no to that?
The convergence begins with Michael Campana, a University of New Mexico hydrologist who e-mailed a New York Times essay on bottled water to friends.
He thought that was the end of it, just something the hydrology crowd would enjoy.
Then he went into a Starbucks to buy a triple-half-caff latte or something and saw a display for "Ethos," a new bottled water.
The hydrologist thought back to the essay, written by Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist.
Standage conducted an experiment with friends. They drank from 10 bottles of water, one of which had been filled from the tap. The other nine were bottled water.
Only one person correctly identified the tap water.
Standage allowed as how tap water was perfectly fine to drink, in spite of a bottled water industry that does something in the neighborhood of $46 billion a year worldwide.
I mentioned this to a poker playing acquaintance of mine who in his special, gracious way said, "Told you so."
Meanwhile, Campana looked at the broader picture.
"Ethos sold for $1.80 a bottle (almost 24 ounces), which seems cheap," he wrote. "But that is almost $10 per gallon, or for you fellow water nerds, about $3.2 million an acre-foot."
The Ethos display announced that the company would donate five cents from every bottle to help people in developing countries get clean water.
"To drive this point home, they had a picture of a smiling campesino by a faucet," Campana wrote. "They should have had his wife and daughters, because they are the ones who bust their behinds getting the household water."
Campana gave points to the Ethos promotion, though he didn't lose sight of the irony of bottled water being sold in a developed country (us), where perfectly good tap water is available, and using some of the profits to bring clean water to those less fortunate.
So he came up with a more nuanced proposal.
"Skip the middleman," he said. "Go to your local Starbucks (or wherever), plunk down $1.80 for a bottle of water, drink it, savor it, save the bottle, and the next time you need water, fill it with tap water and put a $1.80 in a can."
He suggested doing this every time you need water.
"When you get a pile of money in the can, write a check for that amount and send it to an organization that works directly with people to bring clean, safe water to developing countries," he said.
He even supplied names of such organizations, including his own, named after his sister, who died in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

Ann Campana Judge Foundation?- www.acjfoundation.org.

Lifewater International?- www.lifewater.org

Living Water?- www.living-water.org

El Porvenir?- www.elporvenir.org.
And if you want, he said, go to the Ethos site?- www.ethoswater.com?- to see who they help and contribute directly.
Oh, and Campana agrees with that technology-challenged poker player who has argued for years that there's nothing in a bottle that can't be matched by the faucet over at your kitchen sink.
He doesn't think there's a dime's worth of difference, let alone $1.80.