A Study of Bottled Water

A Study of Bottled Water
Name:
Course title:
Instructor:
Institution:
A lot more people have come to embrace the bottled water on the assumption that it is more safe and tastier than tap water. However, the taste of this water depends on how it is treated and also where it was extracted from. Although many of the companies manufacturing this water may want to make people believe that it is the safest, in real sense, bottled water may just be like any other water. This fact has however not stopped people from buying the water. It is estimated that globally, sales from bottled water range from $60 and $100 billion every year, with the market growing at the rate of 7% per annum.
Many people in developing nations are busy looking safe water with a lot of difficulties. Developed countries such as America spend lots of money purchasing bottled water even though the tap water in the respective US states have no safety issues. An intriguing case is that the plastic bottles which this water is stored are an environmental hazard. When not correctly disposed, they live for many years without decomposing thus creating and environmental hazard.
Worldwide, around 55 billion gallons of water are consumed annually, generating around $63 billion. What many people do not understand however, is that a large percentage of bottled (water actually 50%) is in fact derived from the tap water. Another interesting phenomena about is that, not very much testing in chemical constituencies may be carried out in bottled water in comparison to the tap water. It may not be believable to many that some companies manufacturing bottled water do not taste the same for harmful elements. A more worrying instance is that the water could be circulated even without being approved by the quality officials. This is because the health requirement for bottled water is not that strict as in tap water. The subsequent part of the paper is a review of literature with relation to the Methods of treating water.
Methods of treating water, bottled and domestic
Water in its natural form can be considered pure. This is because the bond between its hydrogen and oxygen atoms is strong. The problem of impurity occurs when organic materials, chemicals, minerals and other pollutant share its space. These results into the water being unfit for drinking and contain infections such as bacteria, viruses and other pollutants. Consequently, man has developed a number of techniques for treating water in an attempt of making it fit for consumption (SDWF, 2012).
One technique of treating water in large scale is chemical disinfection. Iodine or chlorine tablets are effective elements which are added on water to make it safe to consume. Other forms of water treatment that are employed includes; Ultra Violet exposure and HYPERLINK "/what-is-ionization.htm"ionization.
Environmental Working Group (EWG) posts that low quality standards for bottled water hinder the user’s ability to go in line with the advice of the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC). CDC articulates that people with a questionable immune system should consume bottled water which is only treated using techniques of distillation, reverse osmosis and filtration. These techniques are regarded as protecting such people from Cryptosporidium; this is a parasite which can cause illness or death with people who have weak immune systems (CDC 2008). But in essence, FDA’s regulation does not require bottling companies to disclose the treatment methods they used for their waters.
Critique
The USA water association defines bottled water as that which meets all state regulations for portabl...