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industry.
For a natural resource that most of us have
access to for minimal cost, water is doing
pretty well as a revenue generator. The
bottled version of the stuff is currently an $8
billion industry in the United States alone, with
Americans drinking about 7 billion gallons of it
in 2005. That's compared to hundreds of
billions of gallons of tap water, but for a
product that can cost up to 10,000 times more
than its municipal counterpart, it's still an
impressive market share.
So what's the appeal? The three most
common reasons given by bottled-water
drinkers are healthiness, purity and taste. As
we'll get into later on, the first two reasons are
somewhat misguided, and the third is open for
debate. For a seemingly basic food product,
bottled water has generated its share of
controversy. Some of it focuses on the federal
and state regulations governing the industry,
some of it goes deeper into the ecological
implications of bottling and transporting
billions on billions of gallons of something that
The pretty pictures and superlative language
on the labels of bottled waters can
sometimes be misleading. One famous
example is the now defunct Alaska Water,
which stated on the label, "Alaska Premium
Glacier Drinking Water: Pure Glacier Water
From the Last Unpolluted Frontier," and
came from one of the municipal water
supplies in Juneau. The currently available
Glacier Clear Water comes from a source in
Greeneville, Tennessee. But if you look past
the names and descriptions and go straight
to the water type, the label will more or less
tell you what's in the bottle. "Spring water"
and "artesian water" are examples of
bottled-water types.
Aquafina and Dasani, the two top-selling
brands in the United States, are "purified
drinking water." Other popular brands,
including Poland Spring and Arrowhead, are
"spring water." Evian is "mineral water," and
Perrier is "sparkling mineral water." Eldorado
Springs is "artesian spring water." These
labels primarily indicate two things about the
water in the bottle: its source and any
treatment it has undergone. We'll examine
the sources and treatments associated with
each type of bottled water and take a look at
the process Aquafina uses to produce its
"purified drinking water," which starts out as
plain old tap water purchased from public
water supplies.
Artesian water: Artesian water comes
from an artesian well, which draws water
from a confined aquifer (an underground,
porous rock or sand formation that bears
water and is under pressure from a layer of
rock or clay above it). The pressure from the
confining layer forces the water from the
aquifer upward. The level of the water supply
the artesian well is drawing from must sit
above the uppermost layer of the aquifer.