ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT YOUR WATER?

Publish date: 2024-07-13

Boiled water alerts. Ruptured water mains. Frozen and busted water pipes. Reports of high levels of cancer-causing chemicals in tap water. Strong chlorine odors and taste. Alarmingly large amounts of lead. More than 400,000 sick from a parasite found in Milwaukee tap water.

It's enough to drive a person to drink -- bottled water.

And despite assurances from public officials that American tap water is the safest in the world, that's increasingly what people are doing -- abandoning the tap for the privilege of lugging gallon jugs home from the local supermarket.

Still others are installing industrial-looking 5-gallon coolers in their kitchens so they can sip on bottled water sold by home delivery services.

"I just never felt safe with our water," says Northeast Washington resident Deborah Tabron, who turned to a home delivery service in December, just after the boiled-water alert ended for District of Columbia and many Northern Virginia residents. Tabron had been buying bottled water from the supermarket for nearly a year out of concern for her 6-year-old granddaughter. "There was so much rust in our pipes, the water was always yellow," she says. What's more, she complains, "I never knew when I'd have water and when I wouldn't," thanks to nearby road construction, which often interrupted water service.

But lugging gallon jugs home from the store every week was a chore -- especially since "you often had to go to several stores before you could find some," recalls Tabron's daughter Lisa. The boiled-water alert -- when water couldn't be found in any store -- was the final straw; now the Tabrons have four 5-gallon bottles delivered by Snow Valley Inc. to their house twice a month. And they've persuaded several friends and relatives to do the same.

Water Sales Gush

During the December water scare, "a lot of people tried bottled water for the first time and found out that it wasn't such a high cost and that it tasted great," notes John LaPides, president of the Maryland-based Snow Valley. As a result, he says, his company saw large sales increases in December. "Usually that's a pretty slow time of the year," LaPides says.

Polar Water Co. saw its number of new customers grow by 69 percent in 1993. "In a tough economy, to experience double-digit growth really says something," says Bob Bingham, Polar's territory sales manager for the Washington metropolitan area.

Overall, Americans bought 2.45 billion gallons of bottled water in 1993, according to preliminary estimates by the Manhattan consulting firm Beverage Marketing Corp. That's a 7.1 percent sales increase over 1992 and nearly double the 3.7 percent increase posted in bottled water sales from the previous year.

Today, one in six American households buys bottled water regularly -- up from one in 17 households recorded nine years ago, the International Bottled Water Association reports. Consumption is even higher in Southern California, where one in three households regularly consumes bottled water. And that was long before the earthquake disrupted water service.

Bottled water has long sold well in the West where, says Blair Mohn, president of the Pennsylvania Cloister Spring Water Co., "they've forever had a shortage of water, especially good-tasting water."

Things have been better on the East Coast. "The East Coast traditionally has had a plentiful water supply," Mohn adds, "which used to be really clean. People in the East used to be hesitant to put coolers in their homes. They viewed it as an industrial appliance -- like a photocopier or fax. It was a machine and they didn't like the aesthetics of it." But "pollution and deteriorating distribution systems, like the water-main breaks, are now driving the bottled water market."

A Flood of Marketing Claims

It's an increasingly aggressive market, too, as each bottler tries to win new customers with promotional prices and claims of superior taste.

Consider Deer Park, whose sales representative answers the phone with a long, prepared spiel: "We're a fine old company with standards we have to keep." A prospective customer barely gets to ask how much home delivery costs before the representative continues: "We want to let you know that the clean, fresh taste of Deer Park is not only good for drinking straight from the cooler, for babies and ice cubes. But you'll be amazed at the clarity and its clean taste in soups and frozen juices. Americans have been drinking Deer Park water for over 100 years because of its quality water and service. We have certain standards -- moral and ethical -- and personal and punctual service."

Then there's the woman who answers the telephone at Mountain Valley Spring water. She tells a prospective customer that her company's water costs $13.50 for every 5-gallon bottle -- considerably more than the $5 to $6 typically charged by other spring water companies -- because the water is bottled directly at the spring, "not put in a big tub, where you need to add chemicals to keep bacteria down."

A call to Mountain Valley president Tom Mitchell reveals, however, that his water is not bottled directly at the spring, but is first pumped into a silo, the way most other spring water is collected, before it is processed. "No one puts water in 'a big tub,' " Mitchell says.

Given the staggering selection of bottled waters, it's little wonder that marketing has become so contentious. Stop in any supermarket and you'll find at least a half dozen brands, plus the supermarket's own private-label water. Then visit another grocery store down the street, and you'll see a whole different batch of brand-name waters. On top of that, there are more than nine companies that deliver water to homes in the area.

And each of these bottled waters has a different taste, as The Washington Post discovered last week in a blind taste test of 20 waters. Some waters were considered crisp and clean while others tasted like plastic, wet wool or metallic. (See story and chart on Page E12.)

Even more bewildering are the prices, which range from a low of 59 cents a gallon for Wissahickon Spring Water (sold at Fresh Fields) to $2.70 gallon for Mountain Valley Spring Co. (available by home delivery). Yet, being the most expensive doesn't mean being the best-tasting water. Washington Post testers gave Mountain Valley water only average marks ("a little dusty," commented one taster), while Wissahickon got a relatively high grade ("a good mouth-feel," one tester said).

At first glance, a gallon of brand-name water bought at a supermarket appears to cost a few pennies per gallon more than the same brand purchased through home delivery. (For example, Great Bear water costs $1.22 per gallon delivered, $1.25 purchased at a store.) But the rental cost of a cooler ($11 a month for the most basic model) boosts the home-delivery price considerably. And while home delivery may seem less burdensome than carrying gallon jugs home from the store, lifting 40-pound jugs onto a water dispenser may be even more difficult for some.

According to Giant and Safeway, consumers greatly prefer spring water to "drinking water," which is nothing more than processed tap water. Giant's private-label drinking water is municipal water from Baltimore that is put through a series of filters, including a charcoal filter designed to eliminate chlorine added at Baltimore's water-treatment plant. The water is also zapped by ultraviolet light and injected with ozone, an unstable colorless gas that is a potent but tasteless disinfectant.

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Giant's spring water -- like most other spring water -- is not as heavily processed as the drinking water. Although the spring water goes through several filters (to remove any sediment), it does not go through a charcoal filter. Nor is it zapped by ultraviolet light. It's simply injected with ozone, then bottled.

Washington Post taste testers liked the taste of both Giant's mountain spring and filtered drinking water. Even so, the supermarket chain's spring water is the bigger seller, 10 times more, in fact. "It has a mystique of being a purer product," says David Larson, Giant's vice president for manufacturing.

But Is Bottled Better?

Mystique, yes. But is bottled water really better -- purer -- than tap water? "You can't assume that," says Velma M. Smith, director of the Groundwater Project at Friends of the Earth. In 1989, after reviewing 15 years of independent studies and tests of bottled water, Smith found that "bottled water frequently contains low levels of contaminants, such as heavy metals and solvents," that too often are not detected and not adequately regulated.

Similar conclusions were reached by Congress's watchdog, the General Accounting Office, in 1991: "Bottled water, including mineral water, may contain levels of potentially harmful contaminants that are not allowed in public drinking water." Smith and GAO assistant director for food safety and quality Ed Zadjura both believe the quality and safety of bottled water have generally improved in the past couple of years, thanks in large part to the bottled-water industry, which has stepped up its own self-regulating efforts through the International Bottled Water Association.

At IBWA's urging, the Food and Drug Administration now is upgrading its rules to impose tighter limits on contaminants in bottled water, with some of the standards being even tighter than those imposed on tap water by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The FDA also plans to set labeling standards that for the first time will require any water bottled from municipal water supplies to be clearly labeled. In the pipeline for more than a year, the rules are expected to be made final by this spring and go into effect next fall.

But even with tighter federal rules, Smith and Zadjura remain concerned about the safety of bottled water because FDA doesn't plan to step up its inspections of bottled-water facilities.

On average, the FDA inspects a bottled-water facility every four or five years, says Terry Troxell, the director of the FDA's division of programs and enforcement policy. "It is one of our low-risk groups," Troxell says. "Bottled water is as safe as tap water. We're not intending to make it safer than tap water -- that's not our job."

That being the case, Zadjura says, there's only one reason to be drinking bottled water regularly: "You ought to be drinking bottled water because you like the taste." And even without boiled-water alerts or water-main breaks, that seems to be exactly what a lot of people are doing.

Giant Super G Natural Mountain Spring Water

Giant Super G Filtered Drinking Water

Amelia Springs Water

ALSO WINNING HIGH MARKS:

Deer Park Mountain Spring Water

Snow Valley Mountain Spring Water

Wissahickon Mountain Spring Water

Fairfax tap water

TAP WATER:

D.C., Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church ..... 1/3 cent

Montgomery and Prince George's County .................. 2/3 cent

SUPERMARKET-BRAND DRINKING WATER

(PROCESSED TAP WATER): ........................ 79 to 83 cents

SUPERMARKET-BRAND SPRING WATER: ...................... 95 cents

HOME-DELIVERED DRINKING WATER

(PROCESSED TAP WATER): ....................... $1.15 to $1.22*

BRAND-NAME SPRING WATER

SOLD IN SUPERMARKETS: ...................... 59 cents to $1.99

HOME-DELIVERED SPRING WATER: .................. $1.04 to $2.70*

*Plus rental fee for water dispenser. According to the International Bottled Water Association, the average fee is $9 a month for a cold-water dispenser and $11.70 a month for a hot and cold dispenser.

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ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT YOUR WATER?