By: Jim Taylor

Last week, before a quick trip to Vancouver, I filled the car's tank at 90 cents a litre. When I topped up in Surrey, on the way home, gasoline prices were over $1/litre.
          The day after we returned, Joan sent me to the grocery store for some Brasso. While I was in the store, I browsed the prices for a variety of other fluids (converted, for comparison purposes, into cost/litre).
          Ketchup, I discovered, cost $5.84/litre. Milk ran $1.69/litre; less, in 4-litre jugs. Apple juice came in at $1.85/litre; ginger ale, $2/litre.
          Clearly on top were Rockstar caffeinated drinks, at $6.32/litre, CLR cleaner at $15.33/litre, and olive oil at $15.58/litre.
          And my 128 ml can of Brasso worked out to $38.98/litre!
          By comparison, gasoline begins to look cheap.
          Even plain, ordinary, bottled water costs as much as gasoline. A name brand, like Perrier, costs more than twice as much.
          There's something a little out-of-kilter here. Because despite appealing pictures of glaciers and pristine wilderness on the labels, a lot of that water came straight out of a municipal tap, where it costs less than 1/10th of a cent per litre.
          But putting it on a store shelves raises its price higher than gasoline?
          Gasoline, by contrast, is not a natural product at all. It doesn't exist in nature. It starts as crude oil, which has to be pumped out of deep underground reservoirs. It is pumped through a pipeline to a refinery. Its molecules are split apart and stuck together again in new combinations. It's trucked to service stations, and stored in expensive underground tanks.

MISLEADING DATA
          A researcher in B.C. checked out a particular brand of bottled water.
          The label proclaimed, "Columbia Bottled Water obtains its spring water from a private and protected source located in Coghlan, B.C."
          Officially, there's no such place. Coghlan was once a railway station, on the defunct B.C. Electric Railway. Coghlan Elementary School and Coghlan Art Gallery, both in Aldergrove, preserve the name, but little more.
          Columbia Bottled Water's website lists their address as #2 - 13370 116 Avenue, Surrey, B.C. It's hardly the middle of a pristine wilderness.
          Health Canada regulates labelling. If it says "purified," the water probably originated in a municipal water system. Coca Cola's Dasani brand is bottled using municipal water in Brampton, Ontario, or Calgary, Alberta. Pepsi's Aquafina also comes from municipal sources.
          If the water is labelled "natural," it's untreated by anything other than by filtration.
          "Spring water" or "mineral water" must have come from an underground source. For some reason, people expect spring water to be pure. It ain't necessarily so.
          While I lived in Toronto, I occasionally took a group of Scouts camping along the fabled Niagara Escarpment. One night we camped below a cliff where a stream of sparkling clear water gushed from the rock. Drivers from the surrounding towns regularly filled jugs from the spring. They assured us it was safe.
          The next day we hiked along the top of the cliff. And found dairy farms. Cows, everywhere. With their wastes seeping into the ground directly over the spring.
          In Walkerton, Ontario, seven people died because e-coli bacteria from local livestock got into ground water supplying the town wells. But because of its underground source, Walkerton water could be labelled pure if bottled.

EXPLOITING FEAR AND DISTRUST
          So what makes bottled water so valuable?
          Pierre Payment, an international recognized microbiologist at the Universite de Quebec, suggests that there are two reasons - marketing, and fear.
          Episodes like Walkerton create distrust of all municipal water systems. Canny marketing capitalizes on that distrust by offering an apparent alternative.
          Around the world, bottled water sales are booming. North American sales have increased at nearly 10 per cent a year. In China and India, the increase tops 20 per cent a year.
          Granted, there are times when bottled water is necessary. After recent storms caused mudslides into Vancouver's water supply, Vancouverites were ordered to boil water, or buy bottled water.
          (With some pique, I note that Vancouver's boil-water warning lasted just two weeks. It made national headlines. In my own community of Lake Country, we lived with boil-water warnings from May through October.)
          I also grant that in many foreign countries, bottled water offers some assurance that a vacation won't be ruined by intestinal malfunctions.
          But Canada is not India or Africa. In Canada, municipal water supplies must be tested daily. Bottled water plants are tested at three-year intervals.
          Professor Rolf Halden of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, argues that "city water is . highly regulated and monitored for quality. Bottled water is not. It can legally contain many things we would not tolerate in municipal drinking water."

CREATING MORE PROBLEMS
          Bottled water creates other problems. Its plastic containers end up in landfill sites. Toxins leaching from those sites affect existing water supplies.
          Bottled water rarely contains fluorides. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, calls water fluoridation one of the world's ten most successful public health initiatives, along with such programs as polio and smallpox vaccination.
          For almost a generation, fluoridated water reduced tooth decay dramatically. Our daughter Sharon had no cavities at all for her first 40 years.
          But the Canadian Dental Association now reports that cavities are increasing again, especially among young people. They blame the increasing use of bottled water.
          There's also an ethical issue. Bottled water creates a class distinction. Affluent Canadians can easily afford bottled water; those closer to the poverty line cannot.
          Organizations as diverse as the David Suzuki Foundation and The United Church of Canada have taken stands against bottled water.
          The current obsession with drinking bottled water reveals how gullible consumers have become. Bottled water damages our teeth, pollutes our landfill sites, contains no energy, and may have more impurities than tap water. But we still willingly pay more for it than we do for gasoline.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.