OT sort of; bottled water

[mm]

So at least one bottled water company admitted today that they use tap water. I forget its name, wikipedia or something, but iiuc they've only changed their label to say p.w.s. on the bottles, which most people still won't know stands for public water source.

Someone from the water industry, maybe this company, was interviewed on the evening news, and he said that the water was processed in 7 stages, including reverse osmosis, ozification, something I forget, and distillation.

Distillation is the one I don't get? First, it would cost a lot of money to steam distill all the water, and steam distillation is the only distillation that meets the def. of distillation, afaik (not counting natural evaporation and rain). Second, it takes all the good tasting minerals out of the water.

So what sort of distillation are they talking about? Or are they pulling our legs?

I figure this is partly on topic because you guys are always talking about well water and hard water and doing all kinds of things to it.

[Cheri]

Aqua Fina a division of Pepsi.

Cheri

[Toller]

They used to say P.W.S. Now it will say public water source.

They claim to sell purified water. There are several ways to do that, including RO, distillation, and filtration. Distillation and RO will remove all the minerals, but they add them back afterwards. They all cost money, but given that the materials are nearly free, the profit margin is incredible. The public is outraged over $3/gal gas, but will pay that much for a quart of water without complaint. I can't tell it from tap water, but that's just me.

[<kjpro]

Dasani... taste great! :-)

[Toller]

Whatever works for you.

[mm]

That&#39;s it. Somehow Aqua Fina reminds me of wikipedia. The i, the k sound, the f/p sounds (which some languages treat as similar, including English (ph=f for some reason.)) Thanks.

Disani is another one that is tap water.

[mm]

OK. That&#39;s good. (I&#39;m sure some people will misunderstand that, but still, it&#39;s pretty good. There is a spring near here, right along the road. I should go sometime. It&#39;s 15 miles away, and I&#39;m not sure where, but I could find it.

So they distill it and add "the" minersals back afterwards. That doesn&#39;t sound very natural, and if they use the very same minerals it sounds like a waste of time**. If they use different minerals, iut sounds freaky.

**OK, maybe they put back everything but the chlorine, but I like chlorine. The greenness disguises the fact that my teeth aren&#39;t very white.

You only have to boil water for a minute or two to kill all the germs. You don&#39;t have to evaporate all of it. And it won&#39;t have any germs if it has been chlorinated.

Neither can I, even with spring water, and if I ever noticed a difference, it would do me no good, because I&#39;m going to drink tap water.

They say that bottled water costs between 200 and 200,000 times what tap water costs.

Before I got to Geneva, my friend found out for me how to say tap water. It&#39;s eau d&#39;robinette, iirc. It&#39;s not in the paperback dictionary, so write it down. (Although maybe robinette means a spigot??, and that would be in the dictionary.) We went out to an fairly expensive restaurant once, and though I asked for that, they brought each of us a small bottle of water. I went out to the car and got my canteen, and after the first bottle, just used the water from that to fill my glass. She&#39;s by no means a spendthrift, but didn&#39;t like what I was doing. Fortunately, she&#39;s not my girlfriend either, so I just kept doing it with no price to pay. I think the bottle was a dollar and a quarter or more, and I drank 6 bottles&#39; worth. No way am I paying 7 1/2 dollars for water for one meal. I still think 7 1/2 dollars is enough to buy a whole meal.

[Eigenvector]

Steam distillation isn&#39;t the only method used. As for putting the minerals back, it does sound wasteful, but really it isn&#39;t if you consider what they are looking for. Suppose the water had (ignore the numbers they&#39;re just examples) 5% iron, 1% manganese, 0.5% sodium, and 20% copper - it might taste fine out of the tap, but they&#39;re selling a product and that product has to be consistent with every batch. So they remove the minerals, then put them back in the exact proportions required by the company - 4.33% iron,

0.6% manganese, 1% sodium, 10% copper. They can only do that by distilling it, then adding the minerals back. Seasons come and go and the mineral content changes with them.

[mm]

I see your point, and you make it well.

STill, this seems like so much trouble. I was happier when I thought they just opened the faucet and let it fill the bottle.

I think that was the system in the office I worked in NYC where they had these really big bottles that went upside down in the water dispenser. They did this because I think there was no water pipe handy. I think the bottles didn&#39;t even have a company name on them.

My ex=girlfriend has a water filter on her sink faucet. When I&#39;m there, I&#39;ve tried to be nice to her by using the filtered water, so I won&#39;t seem to be scoffing at her. She says the water tastes terrible. She lives 10 miles away and uses the same water company, Baltimore, that I do, and I think the water tastes fine. So I&#39;m going to go to her house and drink straight from the tap and see if I can taste a difference from mine. Both of our immediate n&#39;hoods are about 30 or

40 years old, but there were some houses in both places 40 years earlier, so I don&#39;t know much about the water mains, or if hers are like mine.

Our water comes from 3 big reservoirs. I&#39;m not sure what the soil is made of or how much they keep fertilizer etc. from being used in the watershed. There are a lot of hills and streams here so some watersheds are pretty narrow, but I think there is farmland upstream from one reservoir.

[trader4]

In NYC the green folks are now going after the bottled water makers. And they have a good point. Shipping all this water around uses a lot of energy. Some of it comes from overseas. How much energy does it take to ship water from Fiji to NYC? And then there are all the plastic bottles, which take resources and energy to make and are a disposal problem. If you think about it, it&#39;s pretty stupid, when California wants to ban incandescent light bulbs to save energy. Especially when NYC tap water has won blind tasting tests as one of the best drinking waters.

[willshak]

on 7/27/2007 11:45 PM Toller said the following:

It&#39;s funny that the bottled water does not have the source of the water on the label. I thought it was law, like the big bottles that are used in office water coolers. On the cap is listed the source of the water, and not just &#39;public water system&#39;, but the actual source, and where I worked, it came from a reservoir in the next state, which probably means tap water.

[David Martel]

mm,

Like you I caught that on the tube. I only gave it 1/2 an ear but I don&#39;t think the expert said that they use all of these different processes in a sequence to create "pure" water. I think he was saying that any of these processes will get the job done. I do buy distilled water at the supermarket occasionally.

Dave M.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

No, that is why they are trying to make it the law. Some companies have both natural spring and filtered water. Hard to believe that we spend so much money on something as plentiful and easily obtained. I admit our town water tastes terrible, but a carbon filter makes it as good as any I&#39;ve ever had for $10 every three or four months for a cartridge.

[Bill Stock]

I had a bottle of this shit the other day when I was on a course. I thought it tasted horrible, rather dead tasting. I normally don&#39;t drink much water, bottled or otherwise, but I like tap water just fine. Although we do filter it to take out the chlorine. The best water I remember was the well water I had as a kid. But we had it tested once and they said it was full of organic something or other (Beaver Piss). It seems the well was too close to the pond.

[George]

I always chuckle when I see bottled water. The water is great in my area.

There is a large water bottling plant down the road from my office. They bottle exclusively for Walmart and at any time there are dozens of trailers queued to be loaded.

There is a spring fed lake about 30 miles away that was used as a municipal water supply. It became seriously polluted and was taken out of service. There are dozens of tanker trucks that run back and forth between the polluted lake and the bottling plant so they can claim they use "spring water". I don&#39;t know what filtering is used.

[mm]

That&#39;s only 40 dollars a year. You should really buy bottled water for 100&#39;s a year. It&#39;s the American way.

>

[mm]

I agree with you. When I lived in Brooklyn 32-24 years ago, everyone in the city drank tap water and they were happy.

How is the third water tunnel coming?

I have a feeling the NY reservoirs are better than the ones around here, because I think NY got started earlier.

Baltimore was, in terms of sewage, sort of a cesspool for several decades after other cities had taken action. The city would just discharge untreated sewage into the Jones Falls, sort of the primary river on the north side of Baltimore. So I&#39;m thinking, but haven&#39;t checked, that they relied on wells or streams for water longer than NYC.

Besides our 3 reservoirs, there are two south and southwest of here that supply Washington DC. The WSSD, iirc, Washington Sewer and Sanitary District maybe. Besides miscellaneous houses and farmhouses, they flooded a whole town when they built one, less than 100 years ago, I think. During one drought, parts of the town became visible again. (The cemetery wasn&#39;t flooded, unlike in Deliverance)

Back to Baltimore, I think maybe the third reservoir is only about 70 years old, and when it was built, the designer wanted a pipeline to the Delaware river, maybe 40 miles away, in case we ever ran out of water. Some people argued with him but he was respected and they did what he wanted. Finally used it about 60 years later, probably during the same drought.

[mm]

LOL

They say something like that, but the number is nonsense. I drink loads of water, but I can&#39;t drink the numbe they say, proably 8.

I keep a half-gallon milk bottle full of water in the fridge, sometimes two bottles, but it takes a day and a quarter to drink one of them.

I&#39;m only 5&#39;8" but if that makes a difference, they should say so. There are plenty of people smaller than I am.

Yup.

[mm]

I guess polluted spring water is better than no spring water.

[willshak]

I have a 325&#39; deep well and the water is great, even unfiltered. Guests used to take our water home in whatever they could carry it in. We used to save all our milk bottles and I used to bring lots of them full to my mother&#39;s house in DE when I visited. There is a spring water plant a few miles from me. The water comes out of a mountain and fills a large tank inside a small building. Tanker trucks visit the plant daily and the water is pumped into the trucks, which then go off to the bottling plants. When there is too much water from the spring, the excess if drained off through a 3" pipe into a ditch alongside the road. I&#39;ve passed that plant many times when I used to commute and there were always people filling up milk bottles from the pipe.