One piece of news that really caught my interest was the recent decision of the University to stop selling bottled water on campus. I suppose I look at this as particularly good news. I really have to wonder, however, how lazy of a culture have we all subscribed to that we can’t drink water from the tap? The fact that bottled water is a success at all astonishes me, and it reflects poorly on our own culture of students, that we had to wait until a body of authority literally took away the availability of bottled water before we cut back on consumption. There is absolutely no reason to purchase bottled water over regular water, other than laziness.
The first of the so-called benefits of bottled water is that it’s cleaner. There is a mindset instilled into the end user that because the water is packaged, it’s somehow cleaner. Bottled water regulations, however, are managed not by the EPA (the governing force behind tap water), but by the FDA, whose standards are actually lower than those of the former. This leads bottled water to actually be less safe for consumption than plain tap water is. On top of all of this, a study done by the Natural Resources Defense Council showed that 33 percent of bottled water manufacturers violated industry standards.
Another purported benefit of the bottled water is that it tastes better. A large amount of this is attributed to the good old placebo effect, in which those perceived benefits are nothing but a psychological illusion generated by the mind. Double-blind taste tests done by Cornell University show that the rate of success in determining bottled water from tap water amounted to close to 50 percent—in other words, random guessing. In blind preference tests, the majority of the users who claimed to prefer bottled water actually chose tap water as superior on the test. Granted, this is an isolated laboratory study and isn’t necessarily a real-world application. The companies are providing the proof in practice for me, however. Look at “Alaskan Falls.” That sounds like a crisp, clean pristine source of water, right? In reality, the water comes from a state municipal water supply. The manufacturers are using good old tap water in their bottled water to begin with!
As students, there is no legitimate reason why anyone should buy bottled water. Considering the readily-available supply of clean tap water in our dorms and even in Bear’s Den, there’s absolutely no reason why we would even need to get to the point of the University banning bottled water.
Personally, I’m against the University ban on bottled water, obviously not because I like the idea of bottled water, but rather because I think that it’s a terrible idea to have to rely on a coercive force to rob us of the ability to drink bottled water just to reduce consumption. We’re all smart college kids here, and I think it should be up to us to stop endorsing the corporate rape of bottled water and instead opt to spend our money a little bit better. We can’t rely on external forces to change the habits of multinational corporations—rather, it’s up to society to change our habits, understand how bottled water frankly sucks and refuse to support the deception of bottled water practices. Is that really too much to ask?
