Flies May Not Be the Worst Thing You’ll Find in Bottled Water
If you were running out of ideas about how to get free money, maybe this will help. We recently read in an article that a Canadian man was awarded $340,000 for finding a fly in his bottled water. Kind of like finding the golden ticket, right? Except that apparently the lucky guy, Waddah Mustapha, feels that seeing the fly has pretty much ruined his life. Oops.
According to one article, Mustapha and his pregnant wife vomited upon seeing the fly. Mustapha went on to develop severe depression and a phobia of water. He can’t shower anymore, he cant drink water. He even lost his sense of humor. (It couldn’t have been that robust to begin with.)
(And while it is certainly unacceptable and unappetizing to have dead animals of any kind in our beverages, it’s worth realizing that all water, even the purest mountain spring water bottled at the source, came out of the ground. And the dirt. And, well, the bugs.)
While the case was later overturned, the decision was made to award Mustapha the money because “the nature of bottled water is to assure purity and cleanliness and thus psychiatric injury from finding a bug floating in it was foreseeable.”
What they must not have brought to the trial was any actual information about bottled water. What Mr. Mustapha might be surprised (and nauseated, and depressed) to hear is that bottled water is no cleaner or safer than tap water‚ in many cases, less so. While the EPA, which regulates tap water, requires testing hundreds of times each month, the FDA literally has one eye watching over bottled water‚ less than one full-time employee is responsible for its testing, which happens once a week. When tests do happen, bottled water has not passed with flying colors. A study conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council to test 103 different bottled water brands found bacterial or chemical contamination at levels violating‚ enforceable state standards or warning levels “in about 25% of the brands, and nearly a fifth of tested brands‚ exceeded state bottled water microbial guidelines in at least some samples.” Some of the chemicals bottled water is likely to contain include DEHP, a type of phthalate that can leach into water from‚ you guessed it‚ plastic; and bromate, a possible human carcinogen that can be created in the purification process.
In all honesty, though, Mr. Mustapha‚ fears, bogus or not, are not totally off-base. With an aging public water infrastructure and an ever-increasing list of contaminants and pharmaceuticals in our drinking supply, we should take a second to think about what we are drinking. So the impulse to look to bottled water for purity is an understandable one. What consumers need to know, though, is that bottled water is not really a solution to the problems. Since up to 40% of bottled water is tap water anyway, and, as noted above, we have no real guarantee of its cleanliness, the health argument is out. In addition, bottled water companies often create problems for communities by depleting their water supplies. And that‚ only the beginning of the long list of environmental reasons to forgo those convenient little bottles. Take, for instance, the 17 million barrels of oil used each year just to produce plastic bottles for water. And though they are recyclable, that doesn’t mean they are recycled; 86% end up in landfills. And even if you aren’t concerned about the environment, most all of us are concerned about our own wallets, which, when we buy bottled, are shelling out hundreds or even thousands of times what wed pay for tap water. You can read more in our report, Take Back the Tap.
So what is the solution, then? Food & Water Watch recommends that we urge members of Congress to support a clean water trust fund‚ a permanent source of funding for maintaining the water systems of our communities. When tap water has problems, we shouldn’t simply put our heads in the sand, trusting that this water is much cleaner just because someone poured it in a bottle and slapped on a picture of mountains. We need to begin funding our public water infrastructure, so that clean water is available to all. Then no one has to be afraid of taking a shower.