Put a lid on bottled water By IAN GILLESPIE

I would like to formally declare that I now wholeheartedly, unreservedly and unapologetically, believe we are idiots.

Yep, it's official.

What prompted this curmudgeonly complaint? Well, I was strolling through a downtown parking lot when my eye was snagged by the sight of a snazzy Toyota Prius.

The Prius, in case you're wondering, is an environmentally friendly hybrid vehicle that saves fuel and cuts pollution by combining an electric motor with a combustion engine.

Always intrigued by neat cars, I sidled up for a closer peek. That's when I reached the unassailable conclusion that we are -- generally speaking, in a collective sense -- fools, morons and dunderheads.

Neatly stacked in the hatchback of this "green" car were two cases of bottled water.

But what, you ask, is dumb about bottled water in a hybrid car?

Well, listen up, because more and more experts and observers are pointing out buying bottled water is a costly, dumb and environmentally disastrous thing to do.

The City of Toronto, the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and even Maggie Trudeau (who called bottled water "one of life's crimes" in a recent speech at the University of Guelph) have entered the fray.

London scientist Bill Shotyk is also bothered by this bottled water business.

"As a scientist, I have to be very careful," says Shotyk, who divides his time between London and Germany, where he is director of the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry at the University of Heidelberg.

"I can't yell and scream and say, 'Hey, wake up, everybody!' "

Please allow me, then: "Wake up, everybody!"

In a nutshell, there are four big reasons why we shouldn't be buying bottled water.

First, it's expensive. (At more than $2 a litre, bottled water is more costly than gas.)

Second, tap water is safe (and much bottled water is often nothing more than distilled, de-ionized and packaged tap water).

Third, toxic antimony is leaching from the plastic bottles into the water.

Fourth, manufacturing and disposing of these mountains of plastic requires tremendous energy and adds staggering amounts of unnecessary garbage to our overloaded landfill sites. (Only a fraction of this plastic is recycled.)

But don't take my word for it.

According to the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental think-tank, consumers around the globe spend about $100 billion annually on bottled water. The institute points out that for a fraction of that sum, everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation.

The irony is that most water-bottle buyers do it because they believe bottled water is safer than tap water.

But in a study he recently released to The Free Press, Shotyk found bottled water contains high levels of a toxin called antimony, an element used in manufacturing the plastic bottles.

Shotyk says the antimony is leaching from the plastic into the water. The longer the bottles sat around, the more antimony he found in the water.

He adds Swiss researchers found concentrations of antimony nearly 1,000 times greater than Shotyk found in pristine ground water.

The Canadian Bottled Water Association states such amounts are below the levels deemed safe by Health Canada.

But Shotyk says we don't know much about the cumulative effects of this toxin on the body.

"It may be that the water is safe," Shotyk says. "But how do we know? And question No. 2 is, 'What's wrong with tap water?' "

The answer? Nothing. Realizing that fact, the City of Toronto has embarked on an ad blitz aimed at changing trendy behaviours and misinformed beliefs.

Shotyk says the safest and cheapest strategy is to turn on the tap and fill your own plastic bottle -- the sport-type polypropylene bottles contain significantly less antimony than the lighter polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles commonly sold in stores and any toxins present are largely removed by rinsing.

That's cheap, safe and convenient.

When I tell Shotyk about that environmentally friendly Prius filled with environmentally damaging water bottles, he muses about our misinformed good intentions.

"In Canada, with 10 per cent of the world's fresh water, people are buying water in a bottle?" he asks incredulously.

"It's such a waste of resources. I don't know -- maybe people don't give two hoots about the environment."
Email: igillespie@lfpress.com
Home Page
To read Ian Gillespie’s blog, click here.