Reader Response 2

Aidan Keogh

Professor Kelly

English 120 (11:10)

25 October 2012

In 2008, Jane Kay wrote an alarming article suggesting that the bottled water we drink isn’t as clean and safe as we would expect it to be. She bases her article off of a series of studies done by the environmental working group, or EWG. The study was a contaminant screening done on 10 different brands of bottled water, finding that “Wal-Mart’s Sam’s choice contained chemicals exceding legal limits in California”, and “that an average of eight contaminants in each brand. Four brands besides Wal-Mart's also were contaminated with bacteria.” This makes it sound like the water we’re drinking is extremely dangerous, however, after a bit of reading It became clear that there are some major problems with these findings. For one, the only chemical in doses above state standards was trihalomethane only found of the brands, sam's choice. It was found in doses of 14-37 parts per billion, which is only above quality control standards in the state of California which has standards 10 times stricter than the rest of the country. Sam’s choice would have passed quality control standards in any other state, which really makes me doubt that such small doses of the chemical actually have a significant effect on our health. In addition to this, Wal-Mart performed the same study and found that the water they tested was well within the state’s standards, which brings questions to the legitimacy of the EWG’s claims. In their studies, the only used “24 samples from 10 major brands purchased by the group in California, Washington, D.C., and eight other states” which is a relatively small sample size, meaning it’s pretty likely that their tests aren’t that accurate, especially when you consider that there haven’t been any other tests done by any other sources to back up their claims.

The second major problem with this study is that they are incredibly unclear about how dangerous the contaminants found in other brands of water might be. Their second part of the study, finding “ an average of eight contaminants in each brand” sounds alarming, but really doesn’t tell you anything. They won’t release the 8 brands of water that they found contaminants in, they won’t tell us the doses of the contaminants found, and they won’t tell us how bad the contaminants actually are for us. They say that there “were caffeine and the pharmaceutical Tylenol, as well as arsenic, radioactive isotopes, nitrates and ammonia from fertilizer residue. Industrial chemicals used as solvents, degreasing agents and propellants were also found in the tests.” All of this stuff sounds extremely dangerous, but they don’t tell us what the concentration of any of this is, or what doses are actually dangerous. If they were present in levels that are actually hazardous, I would assume that they would be breaking some sort of quality control rules, but the EWG isn't suing any of the other brands. They also didn’t have tap water as a control in their tests; for all we know these contaminants could all be present in tap water, but in even larger doses. After considering all of the problems with the study, and that I’ve never actually bought Sam’s choice drinking water, the only sample that actually bypassed standards, this article doesn’t really change how I feel about bottled water.