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Bottled Water
Testing the Waters
The biggest difference between tap and bottled waters? Cost.
DEFINITIONS
Municipal or Tap Water: The source for about a quarter of the bottled water sold in the U.S. Water bottled from municipal plants must be clearly labeled as such. Tap water that has been further processed and treated can be labeled "distilled" or "purified."
Purified Water: Water that has been treated via distillation, deionization or reverse osmosis.
Spring Water: Restricted to water collected from a spring that originates from an underground formation from which water flows naturally to the surface or from a borehole that connects to the formation.
Well Water: Water from a bored, drilled or otherwise constructed hole in the ground that taps the water of an aquifer.
Editor's Note: Florida Trend hired Ohio-based National Testing Laboratories to analyze several bottled waters produced in Florida as well as samples of tap water from Orlando and West Palm Beach. National Testing Laboratories is one of the largest independent labs in the U.S. specializing in drinking-water analysis for chemical and microbiological contamination. It's the largest provider of analytical services to the U.S. bottled-water industry, testing on behalf of 500 bottling plants around the world.Head down the bottled-water aisle of your local Publix, and the choices are enough to make your head swim: Should you pick up Publix brand spring water, purified water or drinking water, all 69 cents a gallon? Zephyrhills Natural Spring Water? What about Zephyrhills Drinking Water? Crystal Springs? Aquafina? How about water from a source 7,000 miles away? Fiji?
To find out more about what's inside bottles of water produced in the Sunshine State -- and how they compare to tap water -- Florida Trend sent half a dozen samples to an independent laboratory for analysis. We then asked a drinking water-quality expert, University of Florida environmental engineering professor David Mazyck, to interpret the results.
Mazyck's take-home message was this: Bottled waters are not all the same. And overall, Florida's tap water is just as good for you as bottled water.
Trend tested Orlando tap water, which comes from groundwater in the Floridan Aquifer, and West Palm Beach tap water, which comes from Lake Okeechobee. Both tap waters showed the presence of trihalomethanes, or THMs, a common byproduct of drinking water disinfection linked to increased risk of cancer. In both cases, the THM levels were small -- .020 milligrams per liter, a fraction of the EPA's maximum level allowable in drinking water, .080 milligrams per liter.
What might surprise consumers who buy bottled "drinking water" is the presence of THMs in some bottled products, too. Trend's test of Publix brand drinking water found precisely the same, safe level of THMs -- .020 milligrams per liter -- as in the tap waters tested. Publix spokeswoman Maria Brous says the bottle tested by Florida Trend originated as Atlanta tap water. The company monitors for THMs, she says, to make sure they remain within acceptable levels.
The three bottled spring waters tested revealed no trace of THMs but were not free of disinfection byproducts. The test result that most disturbed Mazyck: A sample of Crystal Springs Natural Spring Water that was pumped from Levy County's Wekiva Springs and bottled by Atlanta-based DS Waters of America contained the EPA's maximum-allowable level of bromate, another disinfection byproduct that is also linked to increased risk of cancer.
The Crystal Springs bromate level was .010 milligrams per liter -- the highest level of the contaminant the EPA allows in drinking water. Kent Kise, director of quality and technical services for DS Waters, says the level detected doesn't worry him because the federal standards are rigorous to ensure no risk to consumers. "It meets all regulatory standards," Kise says. "This is why we have standards." Still, he said he plans to investigate Trend's findings.
Most consumers have probably never heard about the issue of bromate in spring water, but Kise says it is "of very high interest to the bottled-water industry as a whole." Bromate doesn't occur naturally in springs. Its harmless cousin, bromide ion, can occur -- sometimes as a result of saltwater intrusion. Bottlers use a purification process called ozonation to ensure water is free of bacteria. When bromide is present, the ozonation process can turn the harmless ion into carcinogenic bromate. "Bottled water can have disinfection byproducts," says Mazyck, "and that can be the case even if the bottle says 'spring water.'"
The water with the best test results was Deer Park Spring Water, which was bottled by Nestle Waters North America at its Zephyrhills plant. But overall, says Mazyck, aside from the bromate issue, "if you drank two liters of water from any of these sources every day for your lifetime, your risk of any adverse health effects is low."
That goes, he says, for both the municipal water and the bottled water. "You can't conclude that one is healthier than the other," Mazyck says, although he asserts that EPA oversight of municipal water plants is more stringent than FDA's regulation of bottled water.
Mazyck's overall conclusions are similar to those of other studies comparing bottled and tap waters. In a blind study using 10 municipal and bottled-water samples from central Florida, James Taylor, director of the University of Central Florida's Environmental Systems Engineering Institute, found that both types of water met state and federal water-quality regulations. Two of the bottled waters had high bacterial counts. The municipal waters had significantly higher chlorination byproducts. Overall, says Taylor, there was virtually no difference except that bottled water "costs 10,000 times more."
