Thames Water Tastes Best
by Bonnie Alter, London on 08.17.07
Bottled water bashing has been an ongoing theme at Treehugger and for good reason: plastic bottles destroy the environment and why pay for what nature gives us. Lately there have been restaurants that have stopped serving it and it has been proven that tap water is just as safe, or safer than bottled. In London, studies have shown that 99.98% of samples of tap water meet industry standards so there seems little reason to drink anything else. Time Out magazine asked a jury to blind-taste six popular brands of bottled water, plus one from the tap. Their findings: they gave tap water from the Thames and River Lea the best score, 4 out of 5. One taster said "It's likeHighland river water. High acidity from a peaty soil. I really like it. The best."
They compared Volvic, Spa, Vittel, Pret a Manger, Fiji and Evian. The funny thing about their comments is that they guessed that each of the bottled waters was tap water (Pret a Manger: "tastes like tap water. The aftertaste is awful. Definitely the worst.") And they guessed all of the brands wrongly, thought Volvic was Evian, and Spa was Volvic. One tip: tap water tastes best chilled--the colder the water, the harder it is to tell its source. So save your money, go green and stick with nature's own. :: Time Out
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The hyperbolic growth in bottle water sales is of course driven by convenience. A second factor is the mythical belief...I would go so far as to call it Urban Legend...that tap water is bad for you because it has chlorine or whatever else the water companies have put in to keep it sterile.
How did this social myth of chlorination risk come about? Greenpeace and its two decade long, glboal campaign against all things chlorine comes to mind. Not that there aren't legitimate risk issues to manage around potable water chlorination. But there were unintended consequences to continuously harping about them to the exclusion of all other perspectives.
Thames Water... mmm, crunchy!
Where else can you make a cup of tea, leave it 5 minutes and come back to a crunchy coating on the top. At least that's what Thames Water west of London in the Chiltern Downs region is like. It may taste okay, but its hardness makes it otherwise unpalatable. Not to mention what all that lime does to one's house plumbing, shower rose, etc.
Having said that, I prefer drinking filtered Thames Water tap water than the bottled stuff.
I'm so tired of this trend toward praising tap water. It's disgusting. I know everyone claims that you can't taste the difference, but I've been able to taste the difference for years. I would drink water when I was a kid because we only had tap water for years. When my family started buying bottled water I started drinking mostly water every day. It didn't make me feel ill. And it wasn't as though there was some trend that made me think drinking bottled water was cool . Now, I will freely admit that this bottled water craze is causing some serious problems: it causes a lot of waste and most bottled water is just tap water (and, yes, I can generally tell when I taste them). And this is why I don't buy bottled water in individual bottles. It's just as easy to buy a few large containers (health food stores sell them) and buy your distilled water at the local health food store. It's better for you to drink distilled water, and you're not hurting the environment. It's just as easy to fill your bottles at the store when you go pick up your groceries.
Besides, chlorine isn't good for you. And the fluoride is not healthy. And to this day, drinking significant amounts of tap water makes me sick. I have no idea why, because I know many people do not feel that way. I just know I have to stick with distilled water, and I think we'd be well-advised to give people other ideas about how to get decent water without having to resort to throw-away bottles all the time.
If one is really looking for an alternative to buying bottled water, then reverse osmosis filtering your tap water and carrying it in reusable (non-plastic!) water bottles seems like the way to go.