Category: Package Design
03/28/2009
David Snyder

Recently we had a client come in that wanted to do a custom personal care bottle design that played off of the ever growing bottled water/ flavored water bottle market-A 22 plus billion dollar a year Industry. With this in mind I set out to find out a bit more about bottled water. Below are a few interesting details pulled off of Webmed and Ashdonaldson. After digging into this the old phrase “think before you drink” took on a whole new meaning...

From Webmed:

The Environmental Working Group tested 10 best-selling brands of bottled water for 170 contaminants and found different mixtures of 38 contaminants, including bacteria, fertilizer, and industrial chemicals at levels similar to those allowed in tap water.

Two of the samples, bought in San Francisco, contained the chemical compound trihalometrane in levels that exceeded the amount allowed in California.

"The bottled water industry really presents this image of purity, but our investigation demonstrated that it is really hit or miss," Environmental Working Group senior scientist Olga Naidenko, PhD, tells WebMD.

From: ashdonaldson.com

Across the world, bottled water enjoys little to no regulation of content, purity and quality standards. In America, the EPA has thousands of researchers testing tap water meets strict standards across the country, whilst the bottled water industry answers only to a single regulator in the FDA.

Recently, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) conducted research on samples of bottled water across America. The EWG found that bottled water contained disinfection by-products, fertilizer residue, and pain medication among other things.

In Cleveland, a comparative study was done to test the fluoride and bacterial content of bottled water versus tap water, and published in the Archives of Family Medicine journal. The researchers found that the bottled water could have more than 1800 times the levels of bacteria (max. 4900 CFUs/mL in bottled water versus max. 2.7 CFUs/mL in tap water), and that only 5% of the bottled water purchased in Cleveland fell within the required fluoride range recommended by the state, compared with 100% of the tap water samples.