- Joined
- Dec 3, 2017
- Messages
- 19,569
Am I over the top about my concerns? The people who are supposed to protect us don't seem to do their jobs.
I used to always have a case of bottled water in the trunk of my car, especially in the summer months and extra cases stored. Parked in the garage, the water didn't get hot in the trunk. Then my daughter took a class that included drinking water safety. Since then, she wants nothing in plastic, especially water and beverages, and has had a Berkey to purify her water before drinking it. She gave me a Berkey so that my water would be purified.
The ease of buying and storing water in plastic bottles is real, but so is the litter of plastic water bottles everywhere in the world. I do have water stored in plastic 5 gallon jugs, and keep a few 1 gallon jugs for the dog parks. What are other options for storing a decent amount of water?
I also keep some water stored in canning jars. Canning jars are heavy and they can break, especially when filled with water. It is not as easy for a family to keep water ready to go and to use it on the go in canning jars. There are places (parks, etc.) where you can take plastic bottles and containers, but no glass.
A former student did research about plastic bottles and drinking water. The result was that he thinks everyone could have metal drinking bottles. As a child, he decided that in order for it to work, he would take it upon himself to make sure that everyone's water bottles were filled and ready to go every morning. I have one that is my daily water bottle and a few in my BOB bags etc.
https://www.consumerreports.org/bot...NaPvZI37jft4m1RiC_ErJy2uJdg2dyhfLkAqluNix4rik
The FDA Knew the Bottled Water Was Contaminated. The Public Didn't.
FDA inspectors have found some companies failed quality standards for bottled water, but the agency didn't take significant action.
By Ryan Felton
November 21, 2019
The government’s May 2018 report on Sweet Springs Valley Water Company, a bottled water manufacturer in West Virginia, was alarming. An inspector from the Food and Drug Administration, during a review of Sweet Springs’ test records, found that several months earlier the company had bottled and distributed water from a source contaminated with E. coli, a potentially deadly bacteria.
When E. coli is detected in source water, companies must cease bottling until they produce five E. coli-free samples over a 24-hour period, according to the FDA, which regulates bottled water in the U.S. But according to the 47-page report—which details numerous other issues and was obtained by Consumer Reports through a Freedom of Information Act request—the company had not stopped production. Nor had it conducted any follow-up tests of the source water.
The inspector asked Sweet Springs’ manager, Mable Cox, whether she had considered recalling the bottled water, the report says. Cox had not. “She also stated the water had probably been consumed by this point, but she would conduct a recall” to alert people who might still have the water at home “if the FDA wanted her to.” That didn’t happen, either.
“FDA did not request a recall,” Amanda Turney, an agency spokesperson, said in an email, without explaining why. Asked about the incident, Cox told CR that, after the inspection, she sent a driver to check stores, but there wasn’t any product left on shelves and she never notified consumers about the problem.
Most bottled water on the market appears to be safe. But the case of Sweet Springs isn’t an anomaly, according to a CR review of hundreds of pages of inspection records and interviews with regulators in seven states. Over the past decade, the FDA has cited companies at least 14 times for failing to meet federal quality standards for bottled water, but in most of those cases, the agency didn’t force a recall of products that might not yet have been consumed. For those products that weren’t recalled, bottlers also don’t appear to have informed consumers about test results showing excessive contamination—something that public water supplies have to do for the same sort of violations.
In other words, contaminated bottled water can still reach unwitting consumers, even if the FDA knows about the problem.
“Companies should not be selling contaminated bottled water, so whenever their own testing finds a violation, they should recall that water,” says Michael Hansen, Ph.D., a senior staff scientist at CR. “If they fail to do so voluntarily, the FDA should require them to.”
Self-Policing
Many consumers buy bottled water on the assumption that it’s safer than what flows out of their tap. That has helped fuel the growth of the bottled water industry, which reached $31 billion in sales in 2018. Forty percent of Americans believe bottled water is safer than tap, a recent CR nationally representative survey found, and about 1 in 6 don’t drink their home tap water.
But the bottled water industry is by and large self-policing. While the FDA requires bottled water to be free of E. coli and sets limits for numerous other contaminants, the agency generally doesn’t test the water itself. Instead, it relies on bottlers to periodically conduct their own tests and to keep those records on hand for FDA inspectors when they visit.
more
I used to always have a case of bottled water in the trunk of my car, especially in the summer months and extra cases stored. Parked in the garage, the water didn't get hot in the trunk. Then my daughter took a class that included drinking water safety. Since then, she wants nothing in plastic, especially water and beverages, and has had a Berkey to purify her water before drinking it. She gave me a Berkey so that my water would be purified.
The ease of buying and storing water in plastic bottles is real, but so is the litter of plastic water bottles everywhere in the world. I do have water stored in plastic 5 gallon jugs, and keep a few 1 gallon jugs for the dog parks. What are other options for storing a decent amount of water?
I also keep some water stored in canning jars. Canning jars are heavy and they can break, especially when filled with water. It is not as easy for a family to keep water ready to go and to use it on the go in canning jars. There are places (parks, etc.) where you can take plastic bottles and containers, but no glass.
A former student did research about plastic bottles and drinking water. The result was that he thinks everyone could have metal drinking bottles. As a child, he decided that in order for it to work, he would take it upon himself to make sure that everyone's water bottles were filled and ready to go every morning. I have one that is my daily water bottle and a few in my BOB bags etc.
https://www.consumerreports.org/bot...NaPvZI37jft4m1RiC_ErJy2uJdg2dyhfLkAqluNix4rik
The FDA Knew the Bottled Water Was Contaminated. The Public Didn't.
FDA inspectors have found some companies failed quality standards for bottled water, but the agency didn't take significant action.
By Ryan Felton
November 21, 2019
The government’s May 2018 report on Sweet Springs Valley Water Company, a bottled water manufacturer in West Virginia, was alarming. An inspector from the Food and Drug Administration, during a review of Sweet Springs’ test records, found that several months earlier the company had bottled and distributed water from a source contaminated with E. coli, a potentially deadly bacteria.
When E. coli is detected in source water, companies must cease bottling until they produce five E. coli-free samples over a 24-hour period, according to the FDA, which regulates bottled water in the U.S. But according to the 47-page report—which details numerous other issues and was obtained by Consumer Reports through a Freedom of Information Act request—the company had not stopped production. Nor had it conducted any follow-up tests of the source water.
The inspector asked Sweet Springs’ manager, Mable Cox, whether she had considered recalling the bottled water, the report says. Cox had not. “She also stated the water had probably been consumed by this point, but she would conduct a recall” to alert people who might still have the water at home “if the FDA wanted her to.” That didn’t happen, either.
“FDA did not request a recall,” Amanda Turney, an agency spokesperson, said in an email, without explaining why. Asked about the incident, Cox told CR that, after the inspection, she sent a driver to check stores, but there wasn’t any product left on shelves and she never notified consumers about the problem.
Most bottled water on the market appears to be safe. But the case of Sweet Springs isn’t an anomaly, according to a CR review of hundreds of pages of inspection records and interviews with regulators in seven states. Over the past decade, the FDA has cited companies at least 14 times for failing to meet federal quality standards for bottled water, but in most of those cases, the agency didn’t force a recall of products that might not yet have been consumed. For those products that weren’t recalled, bottlers also don’t appear to have informed consumers about test results showing excessive contamination—something that public water supplies have to do for the same sort of violations.
In other words, contaminated bottled water can still reach unwitting consumers, even if the FDA knows about the problem.
“Companies should not be selling contaminated bottled water, so whenever their own testing finds a violation, they should recall that water,” says Michael Hansen, Ph.D., a senior staff scientist at CR. “If they fail to do so voluntarily, the FDA should require them to.”
Self-Policing
Many consumers buy bottled water on the assumption that it’s safer than what flows out of their tap. That has helped fuel the growth of the bottled water industry, which reached $31 billion in sales in 2018. Forty percent of Americans believe bottled water is safer than tap, a recent CR nationally representative survey found, and about 1 in 6 don’t drink their home tap water.
But the bottled water industry is by and large self-policing. While the FDA requires bottled water to be free of E. coli and sets limits for numerous other contaminants, the agency generally doesn’t test the water itself. Instead, it relies on bottlers to periodically conduct their own tests and to keep those records on hand for FDA inspectors when they visit.
more
