Water, water everywhere.

In the July/August edition of Fast Company magazine, is an article about bottled water.

I don’t drink a lot of it; personally I really like our well water. It has good taste, I hope some good minerals and hopefully does NOT have too much bad stuff.

But this article opened my eyes to a few things and reminded me of some others.

Most major brands of bottled water are simply filtered or purified tap water from somewhere. I just read today that the FDA (I think the FDA) ordered Pepsi to change their label on Aquafina so it clearly stated that this was simply tap water from somewhere.

Some trivia – Poland Spring water – really comes from a spring in Maine. ANd if you really want to know more about water than you need to know, check their web site - lots of pictures etc. about the process, history etc. Poland Spring is part of the Nestle waters group.

Aquafina #1 seller in the U.S. (Pepsi) and Dasani #2 (Coke) are both filtered or purified tap water from all the cities in which they have bottling plants for Coke, Pepsi etc. which are also about 90% water.

San Pelligrino water comes from Sal Pellegrino Terme, Italy BUT it has no bubbles. Bubbles are taken from water in Tuscany and trucked to San Pelligrino. Another note about Pellegrino – it takes two liters of mineral water to wash each bottle that will then hold ONE liter of Pelligrino.

Fiji water – which I guess is popular in Hollywood (I spent several weeks there in the early 80s on a video shoot and Perrier was all the rage back then.) really does come from the island of Fiji but many of the islands citizens can’t even get clean drinking water. The plant to bottle the water in Fiji has generators since the local utility can’t provide enough power. Transporting plastic bottles TO Fiji and then shipping them back out again full, is about half the cost of each bottle of Fiji water.

Perrier comes out of the ground in France with bubbles.

Evian – another water from France but sans bubbles or a “still” water.

The City of San Francisco gets it water from Yosemite National Park and it is so clean that the FDA doesn’t even require it to be filtered.

In blind taste tests most Americans can not tell the difference between tap water, springwater or the so-called luxury waters.

Nestle is a big bottler of water and recently reduced the amount of plastic in its bottle. OK I know I said I like well water but I also drink some bottled water and we just bought some Nestle’s and the bottle is very thin and flimsy feeling. Crushes easy when you finish.

The Fast Company article says that we still throw away almost 40 billion – yep BILLION - empty bottles from water each year.

All these pieces of information may not mean much but it got me to thinking about the whole idea of bottled water. Healthy for me but expensive, uses up gas and other energy to bottle and transport and at a time when perhaps 1 billion people in the world do not have a reliable source of drinking water, gives a moment of pause and I do think about that every time I take a drink now.