When was bottle water made

If you buy bottled water, it is important to find out how much fluoride, if any, there is in the water. Some companies add fluoride to their product, and the amount must be included on the label.

If fluoride is in the water naturally, the label does not have to include fluoride information. Contact the bottling company to find out how much fluoride is in their product. MDH does not recommend reusing single-use plastic bottles. Reused bottles may be contaminated with bacteria and other disease-causing organisms. Reusing the bottles may expose people to these unhealthy microorganisms. Empty bottles should be recycled to reduce the amount of trash in our landfills.

The FDA considers bottled water to have an unlimited shelf life if it is produced properly and is unopened. Bottled water companies may choose to add a date to the bottle due to concerns about taste and odor, not safety.

Bottled water should be stored in a cool location away from direct sunlight. Bottled water can cost thousands of times more than tap water.

In Minnesota, tap water costs between a quarter and a half cent per gallon, on average. To learn more about the safety of your local tap water, search for your local water quality report on our Consumer Confidence Reports webpage. Contact the Drinking Water Protection Program: health. Some states don't regulate bottled water at all. By far the tightest regulating body overseeing the bottled-water industry is the industry itself, most notably in the form of the International Bottled Water Association IBWA.

The IBWA enforces voluntary self-regulation of its members, who produce about 80 percent of the bottled water purchased in the United States. IBWA members must meet the requirements set forth in the IBWA Model Code, which includes disinfection in the form of reverse osmosis, filtration or distillation for any water drawn from a municipal drinking water source. Companies using protected, natural sources are not required to disinfect the water.

IBWA members must also submit to an unannounced facility inspection once a year by a third-party organization. One independent group that tests bottled water for quality and compliance is the National Sanitation Foundation NSF , which runs a voluntary Bottled Water Certification Program that includes water-source and plant inspection and the testing of both water for contaminants and container-sealing processes.

You probably noticed a few things in the above discussion of regulations. For one thing, the FDA's and the states' regulations are the only ones that are not voluntary, and some states don't have regulations. So that leaves the FDA. And the FDA's regulations are based on the premise that bottled water is not a potential risk to public health.

These are a couple of the points that contribute to the controversy surrounding bottled water. In the next section, we'll take a closer look at the issues. Some people have questioned whether it's safe to store water or any food product in a plastic container. While a widespread e-mail claimed that freezing water in plastic bottles causes chemicals from the plastic to leach into the water, in fact the opposite is true: If anything, freezing would prevent the leaching of chemicals.

It's heating that could possibly lead to problems, and even that is under debate. Some sources, like Grist Magazine's Umbra Fisk no scientific credentials listed , question the safety of plastics 7 polycarbonate , 3 PVC and 6 polystyrene in the use of food or beverage storage, regardless of temperature.

Richard E. Barrans Jr. To quote Dr. Barrans, "The chance of being injured by a car as you are on your way to the store to buy bottled water is much, much greater than the chance that your health will be impaired by drinking water from a plastic container" [ref].

And Dr. He explains that a group of chemicals called phthalates may be added to certain plastics -- primarily PVC -- to increase their flexibility.

If you heat up a water bottle that has phthalates in it, the bottle could leach some of those chemicals into the water. Studies on rodents have shown that ingesting a whole lot of phthalates can lead to various health problems, including liver and kidney damage. So what's the conclusion? Don't leave your PVC water bottle in the car on a hot summer day and then drink from it when you return to the car a couple of hours later, and you should be fine. If we re-examine the top reasons people give for drinking bottled water instead of tap water -- taste, purity and healthiness -- the controversies start to become obvious.

While the FDA prohibits bottled-water manufacturers from implying that their water is "safer" or "purer" than any other kind of water, implications are a difficult thing to quantify. In any event, many bottled-water drinkers believe they are drinking something that is healthier than tap water. In reality, all water is "healthy" as long as it doesn't possess high levels of harmful contaminants, which tap water does not.

The lab tested for contaminants that can cause illness, like E. The results showed no difference whatsoever, in terms of unhealthy contaminants, between the bottled waters and the tap water.

So perhaps it's a matter of semantics, but the issue seems to be more one of purity than of healthiness: Some bottled waters do contain fewer total dissolved solids than tap water, but most scientists agree that the levels of dissolved solids in tap water are not harmful to human health.

And when it comes to dissolved solids, in certain cases and in some opinions, more is actually more. People who drink mineral water presumably are drinking it because they believe the higher mineral count in the water is beneficial to their health. In the case of mineral water, it may just be that the water is healthier than tap water.

On the other hand, an interesting point to note is that many cities add fluoride to their water if it doesn't naturally contain the American Dental Association recommended amount 0.

So people who don't drink tap water may be getting less fluoride than people who do. Dentists warn that this may lead to more dental problems in the long run for people who only drink bottled water that doesn't contain any or enough fluoride some bottled waters leave the fluoride in or add it as a beneficial mineral after processing.

Of course, the healthiness of fluoride-enriched water is forever under debate, so "healthiness" ends up being a somewhat subjective quality. Purity, on the other hand, can be quantified. If someone is looking for purity , choosing purified water may deliver the goods.

With an industry standard of fewer than 10 ppm of total dissolved solids, purified water is pretty close to plain H On the other hand, if someone defines "pure" as "safe," we're right back to the healthiness issue discussed above.

Bottled water sources are typically tested for harmful contaminants once a week at most. Municipal water supplies are tested hundreds of times every month. Tap water may not be perfectly clear, or it may have a slight chlorine aftertaste, but according to the Minnesota Department of Health, those are merely aesthetic qualities that do not indicate the water is unsafe. And bottled water -- even purified water -- does not have to be completely free of contaminants.

So what we're left with is taste. Many bottled water drinkers report taste as the primary reason for their bias -- they just think bottled water tastes better than tap water, end of story. In some cases, this is entirely likely. Since many cities treat their tap water with chlorine to disinfect it, an aftertaste in tap water is pretty common.

And some cities' tap water just tastes bad, even though it's perfectly safe, due to higher levels of certain minerals. But a couple of very non-scientific, blind taste tests have found that most people -- or most people in New York City, to be more accurate -- can't actually tell the difference between tap water and bottled water once they're all placed in identical containers. ABC's "Good Morning America" performed a similar test on its studio audience and received comparable results.

Probably the most scientific conclusion that can be drawn from these tests is that New York City apparently does a really good job with its tap water. A nationwide taste test might provide different results. One of the most serious arguments leveled against bottled water relates to federal regulations, or the lack thereof. Some people believe that water bottled for the specific purpose of human consumption should face exactly the same regulations as municipal water intended for human consumption, whether the FDA regards it as a risky product or not.

The other main regulatory concern is the fact that FDA regulations only apply to bottled water shipped between states. If a company produces and sells its bottled water with the borders of one state, and that state is one of the 10 or so that does not regulate bottled water, that company's product is subject to no oversight at all. Unless it voluntarily adheres to the rules of a trade organization. Which is, well, voluntary.

Beyond safety regulations and general consumer misconceptions that may or may not be fueled by the marketing efforts of bottled-water manufacturers, the other primary accusation against the industry can be summed up in two words: environmental nightmare. Some people use filters like PUR or Brita to filter tap water at home.

These filtering processes can achieve a similar level of purity to bottled purified drinking water, but filtering is much cheaper and doesn't have the negative environmental effects of bottling. Bottled water has been around for centuries, but the brands and tastes have changed remarkably through the decades. For additional insight into the bottled water market, check out our report, Bottled Water Processing Equipment Market. Bottling water began in the United Kingdom with the first water bottling at the Holy Well in The demand for bottled water was fueled in large part by the resurgence in spa-going and water therapy among Europeans and American colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Visits to natural springs and spas became fashionable among the wealthy elite during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The American bottled water industry was started in when a Maine innkeeper, lying on his deathbed, discovered the remarkable therapeutic properties of water from his local spring.

As the popularity of the water grew with visitors, the inn turned into a spa resort and the family began to sell the water under the brand of Poland Spring. A modest demand for bottled mineral waters developed in pharmacies. The bottled water industry remained small until the s, when the development of large-scale retail surfaces supermarkets, hypermarkets boosted demand for new categories of groceries.

This allowed mineral water to be moved from the pharmacy to the grocery category. Early drinkers of bottled spa waters believed that the water at these mineral springs had therapeutic properties and that bathing in or drinking the water could help treat many common ailments.

The popularity of bottled mineral waters quickly led to a market for imitation products. Carbonated waters developed as means for approximating the natural effervescence of spring-bottled water, and in Joseph Hawkins was issued the first U. As technological innovation in the 19th century lowered the cost of making glass and improved the production speed of bottling, bottled water was able to be produced on a larger scale and the beverage grew in popularity.

Bottled water was seen by many as a safer alternative to 19th century municipal water supplies that could be contaminated with pathogens like cholera and typhoid. In the United States, the popularity of bottled water declined in the early 20th century when the advent of water chlorination reduced public concerns about water-borne diseases in municipal water supplies.

However, it remained popular in Europe, where it spread to cafes and grocery stores in the second half of the century. In , Perrier launched a successful advertisement campaign in the U. Today, bottled water is the second most popular commercial beverage in the United States, with about half the domestic consumption as soft drinks.

In , DuPont engineer Nathaniel Wyeth patented polyethylene terephthalate PET bottles, the first plastic bottle to be able to withstand the pressure of carbonated liquids. Today, PET plastic has replaced glass as the preferred material for single-serving bottled water containers due to its light weight and resistance to breaking. Bottled water manufacturing is not a new industry.

However, it has changed significantly over the years.