Water Bottle Testing
Approximately 15 billion gallons of bottled water are consumed in the US alone each year, but independent bottled water quality testing is rare. This leaves consumers subject to unverified marketing by the bottled water industry. We conducted a bottle water testing campaign to develop a water quality database for bottled water. With this database, we investigated bottled water quality, compared tap water to bottled water, and provided easy-to-understand insights to consumers. The sampling campaign was based on a desktop literature review and expert solicitation (interviewing experts/ focus group) to design and develop a water quality sampling campaign. These results supported a digital campaign aimed to transparently communicate the findings. This study included a variety of brands and samples, and results data will be made public through shared laboratory reports.
Literature Review
The literature review aimed to suggest the sampling strategy for bottled water in the US, considering the brand, type of water (spring, purified, alkaline, and distilled), and temporal/ geographic contributing factors. The main considerations in our sampling strategy are the types of bottled water (which brands), inclusion/ exclusion of carbonated water, which tests to run, quantity of samples, geographic distribution, and bottling date.
Contaminants
There have been several studies investigating contaminants in bottled water. Most studies evaluate single classes of individual contaminants, including PFAS (Chow et al. 2021), FA and AA Poly (ethylene terephthalate) (Abe 2021), fluoride (Victory 2017), arsenic (Graziano 2014), and microplastics (Lee 2021). Multiple studies evaluated bacteriological quality. While some analyses focused on key indicator species like coliform and E. coli (NRDC 1999) or heterotrophic plate count (Korzeniewska 2005), others analyzed a wide range of bacteria (Vantarakis et al. 2013) or community structure (Laura Sala-Comorera 2019). Critically, most studies identified contaminant levels of concern in a subset of their samples.
Testing
During our testing pilots, we tested for toxic metals, disinfectant byproducts, coliform bacteria, PFAS (forever chemicals), VOCs, SVOCs, and fertilizers. Additionally we tested for general characteristics including: Alkalinity, Calcium, Conductivity, Hardness, LSI, Magnesium, pH, Potassium, SAR, Total Dissolved Solids, Total Hardness.
Metals: Aluminum, Antimony, Arsenic, Barium, Beryllium, Cadmium, Chromium (Total), Cobalt, Copper, Iron, Lead, Lithium, Manganese, Mercury, Molybdenum, Nickel, Phosphorous, Selenium, Silver, Sodium, Thallium, Tin, Titanium, Uranium, Zinc.
Disinfection Byproducts: Bromodichloromethane, Bromoform, Bromochloromethane, Bromomethane, Chloroform, Dibromochloromethane, Dibromochloropropane, Dibromomethane, Total THMs
Anions: Boron, Chloride, Fluoride, Sulfate
Fertilizers: Nitrite (as N), Nitrate