What are you getting when you drink bottled water? More than you bargained for, perhaps.
“The average litre of bottled water contains almost a quarter of a million nonneoplastic fragments”. That is the headline from new research from Columbia and Rutgers universities in the US, which suggests if you are drinking from plastic water bottles you might be ingesting more than you bargained for. As the NPR website reported,, “Researchers from Columbia University and Rutgers University found roughly 240,000 detectable plastic fragments in a typical liter of bottled water. The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”.
This is a serious piece of work. It has been difficult to analyse nanoplastics because of a lack of analytical techniques. But “This study developed a powerful optical imaging technique for rapid analysis of nanoplastics with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity. As a demonstration, micro-nano plastics in bottled water are analyzed with multidimensional profiling of individual plastic particles”.
Much of the plastic fragments appear to be coming from the bottles themselves. We don’t know for sure that microplastics are damaging for human health, but it seems likely. Various strange chemicals getting into your liver seems unlikely to be a recipe for a long and healthy live.
I remember my wife and I going on holiday over the channel in the 1980s and being amazed every time we went into a Carrefour that the French bought such huge quantities of bottled water. It will never catch on in the UK, I thought, we’re far too sensible to fall for that when our tap water is more than drinkable. Mars even considered moving into that market when I worked there but decided against. But how wrong I was… the UK fell for the scam in a big way.
In most developed world countries, there is simply no point in bottled water. It is bad for the environment in many ways – emissions around production and transportation, the issues around plastics production, waste and disposal, use of scarce resources, and more. Now we know that it is probably harming our health too, we really should start a drive to eliminate it in any country where the water out of the tap is drinkable.
A report from the United Nations last year looked at the market for and impact of bottled water.
“The report collates scattered information on plastic pollution associated with bottled water, pointing out that the world currently generates around 600 billion plastic bottles amounting to approximately 25 million tonnes of plastic waste, which is not recycled but is disposed of in landfills
or as unregulated waste. While there are signs of growing social awareness of the adverse impacts of plastics on the environment, a breakthrough solution that could radically reduce the environmental impacts of plastics does not yet appear to exist”.
600 billion bottles! It is incredible.
What about in your organisation? Do you have bottled water available in reception for visitors? Do you sell it in the staff cafeteria? Is it provided in meeting rooms? And of course, do you buy it yourself retail or in restaurants? It probably helps that I am cautious with money, but I have never had a problem saying, “tap water please”, even in Michelin starred restaurants. I do understand that in some countries, bottled water makes sense, but not in most of the developed world.
Firms like Nestle do have real purposeful business successes to shout about. Bottled water no doubt contributes a lot to their overall corporate profits, but really, this is a major negative on their company “sustainability balance sheet”. Perhaps we need a campaign against it – Caitlin Moran in the Times last week commented on the study and asked if bottled water was going to be “the new smoking”? Maybe it is not quite as damaging to our health, but equally it does not have the addiction problems of tobacco - so let’s just stop buying and using it.