The concept of “choice” is not one usually associated with the food and beverages provided by Boston College Dining Services. However, for students whose beverage of choice (during the week) is bottled water, BC offers not one, not two, but three different choices, each coming in different sizes with different characteristics at different prices. Corporate interests are colliding with student tastes in a bottled water battle that has just begun to be waged.
Americans are increasingly turning to bottled water, according to a 1999 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The $4 billion-a-year industry continues to grow rapidly, as people fight for the right to pay from 240 to over 10,000 times the cost of the same amount of tap water.
The first question BC’s devoted consumers should ask themselves when choosing bottled water is if they are really getting their $2.75 worth from that bottle of Evian.
First of all, studies by the NRDC have confirmed that in nearly one-third of the popular brands of bottled water, the water fails to pass at least one state or federal standard for contamination and impurity. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) devotes little effort to the regulation of the bottled water industry, as nearly 70 percent of bottled water sold in the U.S. is exempt from FDA standards since it is sold within the state it was produced. From this perspective, the significantly more stringent standards that the FDA and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hold to city and town tap water supplies ensure that water is at least safe from bacterial or chemical contamination.
When you buy a bottle of water, you are trusting that the company who bottled it took all of the prudent steps to ensure the safety and purity of the water. Some claim that companies generally hold themselves to a much more lenient standard than public water suppliers are forced to by law.
The term “spring water” evokes images of the purest, most natural environment: water bubbling from a source deep in the woods of Maine, as Poland Spring claims. The sources, though, of other companies’ water are questionable. The lakes and mountains pictured on BC’s beloved Evian and Carrabassett Spring Water bottles don’t necessarily reflect what the source looks like. In one case, the “natural source” was a periodically contaminated well near a waste dump. Now, the filtering process might be thorough enough to render the water drinkable, but the idea of where the water might come from makes the good ol’ Boston tap water sound a little bit better.
Spring Break
