Abstract.
Water is essential to human life and health. Safe drinking water from contamination and readily available in houses and working places is a fundamental health factor to humans, but also connected with longevity, economic growth and reduction of poverty. Clean water and sanitation for all is the 6th of UN Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in September 2015 as part of Agenda 2030. Public drinking water in most countries follows international standards and processes that protect its quality and have acceptable safety limits for microbial, chemical, and radiological characteristics. But in the last decades consumption of bottled drinking water has increased exponentially to become the water of choise with billions of litres consumed every day, despite its similar quality and taste with municipal tap water. Tap drinking water is more than 1000 times less expensive and people do not throw away millions of plastic PET bottles polluting the environment on a daily basis. But false perceptions distort the reality of safety and taste of tap drinking water. People all over the world are influenced by light odour of chlorine which is authorised for microbial disinfection of tap water (makes tap water safer than bottled water). Consumers are worried about problems with the municipal distribution water services and old type of water pipes. Although these issues are secondary to taste and safety of drinking water, consumers take them at face value and succumb to the bottlled water promotion. Companies of bottled drinking water use “aggressive” campaigns to promote their products as superior quality with rejuveneting taste. Worldwide advertisements promote the distorted idea that bottled water is collected in exclusive, natural and exotic mountain spring sources with superior qualities. Fresh water contains 0.05% of inorganic salts. Some spring mineral water from underground sources can have total dissolved salts 500 ppm and trace elements, like Mg, Ca, Na and K. The “Right2Water” campaign by the European Federation of Public Service Unions, supported by a large number of NGOs, public water companies and water activists in Europe, aimed to shift the focus and promote the use of tap drinking water instead of bottled water.
http://chem-tox-ecotox.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/TAP-DRINKING-WATER-BOTTLED-WATER-2020.pdf