Hard to Swallow
Nationwide sales of bottled water have increased nearly 50 percent in the past five years. Behind the growth are some disturbing practices.
First the water must be bottled. Here, in a special report called "Water's Edge," Ivan Penn of the St. Petersburg Times describes how Nestle Waters North America does it in Florida.
Nestle came into Florida and managed to pull off quite the coup.
The company got a permit to take water belonging to Floridians — hundreds of millions of gallons a year from a spring in a state park — at no cost to Nestle.
No taxes. No fees. Just a $230 permit to pump water until 2018.
Nestle bottles that water, ships it throughout the Southeast — much of it to Georgia and the Carolinas — and makes millions upon millions of dollars in profits on it.
Then the water must be labeled.
In small print on its bottles, Nestle discloses where the water comes from — sometimes. Gallon containers of Deer Park Natural Spring Water sold in the Tampa Bay area, for instance, do not identify the source. A spokesman said this week that the company will change its labels to identify the sources on all their bottles.
But for now, a shopper at a Publix in St. Petersburg can find gallon containers of Deer Park and Zephyrhills natural spring waters on the same shelf. The Deer Park brand goes for $1.29 a gallon, the Zephyrhills for $1.19. What the shopper can't tell is that the Deer Park water was bottled in Pasco County, at the same plant — and with the identical water — as the Zephyrhills brand.
Finally the empty bottles must be recycled or trashed. Pamela LeBlanc of the Austin American-Statesman, in "Bottled Water's Problems Surfacing," provides some thought-provoking data.
In the United States, about 15 percent of custom plastic bottles, which include water, juice, tea and sports drinks (but not soda, which is counted differently), are recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The rest — an estimated 45 billion plastic bottles a year — go into landfills or become litter. That's almost 160 plastic bottles trashed per person per year, according to the institute....
The total energy needed to make, transport and dispose of one bottle of water is equivalent to filling the same bottle one-quarter full of oil.
Both writers cover much more ground than I've indicated here, and their informative articles are well worth reading.
http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/drinking-water/
statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/20/0420bottledwater.html