Emerson Brooking | Going with the flow

If you stepped through College Green a few weeks back, you probably noticed the obnoxiously tall pile of trash outside of Van Pelt (with accompanying bulldozer) and the sea of discarded plastic water bottles staked across the lawn in the same manner that other groups have memorialized 9/11 or Iraq War casualties. Both displays were the work of Penn Environmental Group's Greenfest 2008, an event which strives to raise campus awareness of environmental issues. Both displays were also-I thought-more flashy than effective.

I considered the water-bottle stunt to be particular overkill and walked away from the display intending to write a column criticizing the mounting backlash against bottled water and highlighting some of the perceived positives (price and quality, for instance) of bottled-water use.

The problem was, the facts didn't pan out that way. After dozens of Google searches and archive hunts in a couple of major newspapers, I discovered little to no discernible advantage in drinking bottled water over tap and a bevy of reasons not to touch the stuff at all.

These facts - coupled with a little common sense - made me realize that bottled water critics are simply on the right side of the issue.

According to The New York Times, following the tried-and-true regimen of eight glasses of water a day for a year would cost about 49 cents drinking New York tap, as opposed to roughly $1,400 - 2,900 times more expensive - for the equivalent in bottled water.

But this figure, combined with the fact that the average 16.9-fluid-ounce bottle of water now costs well over a dollar, has done nothing to stymie its popularity. Over the past few years, bottled water demand has grown at the expense of every other beverage except sports drinks, and recently overtook both milk and coffee in terms of overall consumption.

Fueling bottled water's rapidly swelling popularity is the notion that water from a bottle is "safer" than water from a tap, but very little evidence suggests this to be the case.

According to a report issued to Congress by the Natural Resources Defense Council, 60 to 70 percent of bottled water brands are packaged and sold within the same state, exempting them from FDA regulation. Furthermore, state laws concerning bottled water production are generally lax - and sometimes nonexistent.

Even nationwide brands subject to FDA regulation are tested far less frequently than tap water for dangerous contaminants, and even then not as thoroughly.

More interesting still, government sources estimate that roughly 25 percent of all bottled water products are nothing more than repackaged tap in disguise.

And speaking of tap, few issues are able to more quickly stir the public ire - and sway people toward bottled water consumption - than the discovery of unwanted trace chemicals in municipal-water supplies.

Last March, water testers discovered trace deposits of 56 pharmaceuticals in the Philadelphia water supply, reported as the highest in the nation. Less publicized was the fact Philadelphia's water testing was more precise than any other city in the country, and that surveys of the major bottled water brands - if exposed to the same level of scrutiny - might have yielded far darker results.

The most frequently acknowledged problem with bottled water usage is pollution. Only one out of six plastic water bottles find their way to a recycling plant, but even then, the effect is minimal. Ninety percent of the pollution caused by bottled water occurs before the product is ever opened: Production and transport of plastic water bottles wastes over 50 million gallons of gasoline a year, all to house the most commonly available resource on earth.

Still, for those of us accustomed to buying bottled water along with other everyday commodities, it's hard to break the habit. I grew up on Georgia water from a good artesian well. When I got to Penn, I took one sip of the tap, made a face and vowed to buy bottled water from there on out. For folks like me who are unwilling or unable to stomach the taste of the Philadelphia municipal water supply, Brita filters represent a safe, effective and steadily more appealing alternative.

As for the bottled water display I set out to criticize, it certainly ended up making an impression. Bottled water is expensive, of arguable benefit and unquestionably bad for the environment. Our country has enough problems as it is-a harmful bottled water habit doesn't have to be one of them.

Emerson Brooking is a College sophomore from Turnerville, Ga. His e-mail address is brooking@dailypennsylvanian.com. Southern Comfort runs on alternating Tuesdays.

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