NYC tap water in bottles
Jay sez, "A new bottled water company is selling NY tap water in bottles and filling up people's empties as a way of spreading the word that tap is good, it's better for the environment than shipping bottles in from Fiji, it's fun, it's blablabla. You get the idea."
For my money, NYC tap water is delicious.
TAPDNY (Thanks, Jay!)Year after year, bottled water companies have told us that their water was somehow healthier or better for us than our own water. They spent billions of dollars on marketing to make us believe that we needed exotic water, in sleek packaging, from far away Arctic glaciers, tropical islands, and European volcanoes.
We fell for the fancy marketing gimmicks, too, and the brands we drank started to become status symbols.
But we're New Yorkers and are ready for an honest change. It's time for a better way of thinking drinking: A Tap'dNY Manifesto for the new age.
the latest
latest episodes
There's a theory that NYC pizza, bagels, etc. have their unique, flavorful, airy kickass-ness because of the NYC tap water. Guess we can use these bottles to test that theory out.
Somewhat related, I managed to wean myself off of sodas by drinking seltzer water (the cheap stuff, vintage, super chill, etc.) Now of course I can't stop drinking carbonated water and I'm becoming more aware of the volume of plastic bottles I'm leaving in my wake. I saw a demo of an appliance that pumps air into tap water to make it carbonated at a home and garden expo but I was a little skeptical because they were also selling Super-Shammies and Wonder Mops. Is there any practical way to make tap water carbonated at home without generating a mountain of waste or do I just have break down and start drinking tap water?
"For my money, NYC tap water is delicious."
Really? I'd love to try it. Do you think they'd ship it to me in Fiji?
This product unfortunately misses what's really great about Fiji water - the sqaure bottle shape means that it doesn't roll around in your car. (The water itself is just water, with a ridiculous carbon footprint and risk of water supplu issues in Fiji, though I suppose the carbon footprint for hauling water from Fiji to California by ship is probably lower than hauling it from New York to California by train :-)
Another great solution to reducing waste from bottles and transportation of water, is to buy and use either a pitcher-style, or attach-to-the-sink style filter.
I like my water to be icy cold, so having a pitcher water filter in my fridge has been perfect for me the last couple years. It tastes better (to me) than tap water, and the only thing I throw away is a filter full of activated carbon once every 3 months or so.
I've also got a dedicated filter to pass cheap alcohol through. 3-4 passes really does take a lot of the harshness of even the worst vodka.
I wouldn't mind drinking my tap water except that the pipes are a hundred years old and the water comes out so cloudy you could mistake it for milk.
,,,Should we send Teresa a couple of bottles of this miracle water and see if it makes her feel any better? :-) :-)
"I've also got a dedicated filter to pass cheap alcohol through. 3-4 passes really does take a lot of the harshness of even the worst vodka."
...I've used those gadgets as well, and they also do wonders for the expensive vodka as well. Hell, they almost make Clear Pis...er...Skyy tolerable!
This is nothing particularly new. Every X years someone tries marketing NYC tap water.
In general, the tap water is excellent, but it is indeed a function of which resovoir your water comes from, along with the state of the pipes in your neighborhood.
Sometimes, even in the best water-areas, you get that weird creepy "effervesence" or cloudy water, and then the water kinda sucks. But when I'm outside of NYC I tend to miss the water.
I've heard in the past that some brands were actually being filled from NYC hydrants/pipes. So you may already be drinking NYC tap water.
Cloudy water is the result of tiny air bubbles. We have it here because they force water into the aquifer to push the water up. It's not a sign of bad water. The quarter teaspoon of white precipitate in the bottom of the martini glass is a sign of bad water. And, no, I'm not making that up.
Also, NYC has had great ratings for its water for many decades. San Francisco also has great water. However, if there's a public health scare, like a couple of cases of Legionnaire's, water districts will commonly up the chlorination for a while and your water will taste vile.
Zombie, your water is probably just cloudy from air, not any kind of contaminant. A lot of water in NYC is like that because of how it's pumped around from what I've heard. If you let it sit for a few seconds, it turns clear.
On a different note, the idea that bottled water is somehow cleaner than water that gets to your house from a town or city water source is kind of ridiculous when you look at the differences between the EPA guidelines for tap water, and the FDA guidelines for bottled water. Like here. Of course, if you have your own well, that's your own lookout.
Well, if it's good enough for this hipster, then who am I to argue!
#2: I don't know about pumping "air" in; I don't think that the water will hold the mostly-nitrogen the way it does carbon dioxide. You can get a standard 1-liter iSi soda siphon for about $35-40, and chargers for $4-8 per 10. This comes out to around the same price as Vintage after a (long) while and imho it tastes a lot better, at least when using good NYC tap water. It doesn't have the plastic taste from sitting in the bottle and the bubbles are also "finer". Dispensing is also easier, and it doesn't go flat since the siphon stays over-pressure. Finally, you don't need as much storage space; you can fit 5 or 6 boxes of chargers in the space of one Vintage bottle. As long as you keep stocked up, no need to run down to the botega at midnight for a bottle of seltzer.
On the downside, you still have the wasted steel chargers. I don't know whether or not this is overall worse for the environment than the waste of a plastic bottle, though I suspect it is better. If nothing else, it's easier to carry out to the curb than 10 empty plastic bottles...
I got stuck doing a tough, physical job in Brooklyn yesterday. And what kept us alive? NYC water from a garden hose.
It was delicious, icy cold, and free.
This product is nothing to be proud of. Bottled NYC Tap may be better than Fiji water from a carbon footprint perspective but this water is not good for the environment when you incorporate plastic bottle manufacturing, then shipping to the bottling plant, energy to fill those bottles, and then finally shipping to the distribution site.
I guess they are also filling up people's empty bottles too....but that doesn't get them off the hook.
Yup. There have been news report that pop up every now and then about how bottled water is no different from tap water (example), and, in many cases, is tap water.
For me, I don't get all the fuss. Tap water tastes great! Then again, I grew up in a house where my parents had to boil and filter every drop of water anyone drank...even the dog. So any water that doesn't taste flat and insipid is reason to dance!
Toolbag @ 2
You guys don't have SodaStream in the US? Ouch!
Just don't add any flavouring, and you have home-carbonated water.
Toolbag, do a Google/Froogle/whatever search for "Seltzer bottle" or "soda syphon" - those things that clowns or the Three Stooges used to spray each other with in old movies.
They're just reinforced glass or metal bottles with a CO2 cartridge holder and a trigger. Water goes in, seltzer comes out.
So every one is going to drink tap water now and the bottled water business will die ? Even if the start bottling melted penis shaped iceberg ?
J.
Most tap water has around 100 ppm of impurities (most of it chlorine, which prevents bacteria from proliferating.)
Next time you buy bottled water, take a look at the mineral salts and other impurities report on the bottle's label: most bottled waters (especially spring water) contain from 150 to 400 ppm in impurities. The ones with more impurities usually have a high sodium content (and will taste saltier.) Otherwise, the most common impurity is HCO3, which are carbonic acid ions (the result of CO2 dissolving into the water, so that in fact, this is like slightly carbonated water.)
The best water you can get for drinking, assuming you have a healthy and varied diet and are not missing any required minerals which could otherwise be obtained from tap or spring water, is distilled, or otherwise pure water (which usually must be certified as containing less than 5-10 ppm in impurities.) This kind of water can also be obtained from reverse osmosis, and there are systems you can get for your home that will let you get pure water directly from a tap. Just don't use that kind of water for your goldfish, or they'll die (very little to no oxygen in solution in the water, so the fish choke to death.)
You can just send those CO2 canisters right back to the manufacturer, or if you have a big enough pile the scrap dealer and/or local hobos will pay you cold hard cash for them. They can be reused which is much more efficient than recycling.
NYC tap water has a tremendous amount of chlorine in it. Filter your water at home, and fill a SIGG bottle to go--problem solved.
The AP has been doing articles on pharmaceuticals found in the water supply. NY refuses to test..
#21: I suspected they could be re-used, but I have no interest in paying postage to ship them back for the manufacturer. Do you know roughly how many empty chargers I need to collect to make it worth a hobo's time to take them off my hands?
Los Angeles tap water varies greatly, even over very short distances. My old apartment's tap water was terrible. My new apartment has drinkable (but not great) water. They are two blocks apart.
If you buy Dasani or Aquafina in the NYC area, you're probably already getting bottled NYC tap water, since Dasani and Aquafina are just Coke and Pespi (made from the local public water supply by your regional Coke or Pepsi bottler) without all the sugar, coloring and bubbles.
They do add some "minerals" to Dasani, but I believe Aquafina is exactly the same as this product: local tap water run through a reverse osmosis filter.
#2 & #13: soda syphons are also 100% Comedy Gold. It's like having a loaded gun; at some point, it's gonna get used...
Hey, wait a minute. Aren't my taxes paying for that water? Where's my cut of the profits?
It's an interesting marketing gimmick, but it's still a gimmick as vapid as the ones presented by Fiji, Aquafina et al. This gimmick is also it's fatal flaw: If you're saying tap water is as good as any bottled water, I'm supposed to reward you by paying a premium for tap water and a plastic bottle?
A better idea would've been just to sell SIGG bottles around a pro tap water campaign. No hint of hypocrisy that way, and it could've been an actual 'movement'. Instead, it's, "You've been played by big corporations; isn't it better to be played locally?"
Gilbert,
Would that be Chekhov's Seltzer?
Here's a The Guardian piece on tap water that mentions NY: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/23/bottled.water.tap
Now here's the thing. I drink tap water at my home because I have my own well.
The difference?
Cities water is often full of chemicals in various amounts that are not present in my well water. Some are put there (in an effort to be sanitary) and some were there to start with.
Most city/county water management offices offer a publicly available list of what is in the water. I prefer not to drink anything with arsenic or an excess of fluoride and chlorine in it.
@toolbag, you might consider investing in a small soda fountain apparatus. If you have some empty counter and cabinet space, you buy your CO2 by the (refillable) tankload, put the gas under the counter, and run 'til you're done. As long as there's a restaurant in the neighborhood it shouldn't be hard to find a supplier.
Fluoridated tap water is nothing to write home about because it's not safe for consumption:
http://www.fluoridealert.org/fluoride-facts.htm
Oh, FYI
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/wsstate.shtml Get the Water Quality Report, head towards the end where the tables are that present amounts. Also, go read about NYC possibly falsifying the numbers for the amount of LEAD in the tap water, here: http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/nyc-epawater1006,0,5945648.story?coll=nyc-moreny-headlines
Drinking NYC tap water sounds weird to me. What is the use of selling the tap water it will just give more companies to make more money on selling NYC's tap water. I do not find it safe to drink until it is boiled, or purified.Even though we have one of the cleanest waters in the world I still would not drink unless I am extremely thirsty.
That's Nasty, I wouldn't pay a penny for that water.
Fedya,
No blog links, please.
Years ago when I lived in NYC, I saw people selling "Brooklyn Tap Water" at the mini-mall on Bedford.
And I do agree, NYC tap water was good. I drank it all the time. The pharmaceuticals issue does scare me a bit.
Funny story though, when we lived in Brooklyn, we got a Pur water filter for the sink as a gift and it stopped working within 2 weeks. We called the company and they asked for our zip code and when we gave it, without looking anything up he said, "yeah, that zip code breaks our filters." Many friends had the exact same experience. NYC water is not kind to filters. Nothing bad. Just more minerals than most tap water I think.
Savannah water has Tritium, but the lead in the old pipes cancels it out.
Reverenddrjice- I agree. It may be honestly promoted tap water, and it might not be shipped AS far, but it's still a terrible waste of resources to bottle and ship it when most people could get the same quality water from their own tap, or with a filter pitcher. The only good thing about it I can see is that it promotes the message that bottled water companies are often dishonest and bad for the environment, but it undermines its own message a bit by existing at all.
RE seltzer syphons:
Until the mid-80s, maybe longer, maybe even still, there were companies in NYC that delivered charged seltzer syphon bottles to your home. Kind of like home milk delivery; you left out the empties and got another box.
It was a big business early in the century, but held on, probably thanks to elderly Jewish immigrants who still dug the stuff.
Bottled water is a racket. I've been in it. There are many ways to lie legally in labeling. Support your municipal supply or one day you will find it gone. Any intelligent person really ought to make the time to tell their local politician that they consider pure water a right and will PUNISH whoever is in office the day the taps run foul or dry. What the hell are politicians for if they can't even guarantee a drink of clean water?
Support your municipal supply or one day you will find it gone.
@Takuan #43: If you've seen Idiocracy, you know that in a few years we'll all be drinking nothing but Brawndo anyway. Duh.
Wow, an "honest change/manifesto" we pay to market and promote. Very thrifty.
I don't get the whole anti-bottled water thing around here. No one is bathing in this stuff. People buy bottled water when they are out somewhere and the value add is that there is cold, clean water where you are. If I'm at a gas station in the middle of the day I don't have access my home faucet.
Also, just because your water tastes ok doesn't mean it does everywhere. I live in North Texas and the water taste like dirt all summer. When I'd visit my grandmother in the summer when I was a kid the water tasted like sulfur.
I agree about the fluoridation -- that's why I only drink bottled water.
How can people think it is acceptable to put drugs in the water for any reason. I'll drink the water from the tap when in Europe (even there I'll put it through the PUR water filter first) but not in the US. If the CDC says American TAP WATER IS UNSAFE FOR NEWBORNS, then there is a major problem with our water!
There's only two occasions I've had tap water that didn't taste good. Some relatives lived at the time in an area where the water smelled of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide). The other time was a few years ago here in Chicago when the summer was much less cloudy than even a normal sunny summer and the water tasted skunky. I seem to recall that the sun was causing excessive algae growth in Lake Michigan.
Why buy bottled tap water instead of just getting it from the tap? Your taxes have already paid for it; why pay again?
Oh, I get it. Cory's being sarcastic! He really thinks the whole idea is stupid. Yay Cory!
i like the concept, but are they charging the ridiculous prices that their competitors do?
also, a lot of people seem to mistake cloudy tap water for water that has been aerated due to the pressure and movement in the pipes. try letting your water sit sometime, see if it clears up; if it doesn't, you're water is genuinely gross, but otherwise, don't worry, it's just air that makes it look gross.
I have been drinking water from the tap for years. I used to boil it first. Later I switched to using water filters. Finally, I simply drank the water from the tap. What diseases can I get?
BTW: I don't live in New York.
I live overseas and drink Volvic which is French bottled water and the most popular bottled brand where I live. I drink it because it is delicious and tastes exactly like the high-calcium water from the well we dug at our home in New Jersey (because even though in Bergen County about 45 min from New York City, our town had no municipal source).
We had to drill way down deep into bedrock and apparently hit an underground stream. It has enough calcium that humidifiers would leave white precipitate, but it tasted awesome, and I have no cavities so far at 40. Now of course my folks soften it and it tastes terrible, but now that I think of it they could give Volvic a run for their money.
What a bunch of bullshit. $36 for 24 bottles?
I'm sorry, but pointing out the problem with other products doesn't make you exempt. You're just as bad as any other bottled water company scamming people despite your transparency.
What a dumb idea. Let's clog the landfills and streets with more plastic. Let's get people to pay through the nose for bottled municipal water that has been put into carcinogenic/estrogen-disrupting-compound-leaching plastic and shipped at considerable environmental cost far from the people who have any actual claim to the water. Oh wait, they've been doing that for years.
I wonder if every New Yorker gets a cut of the profits- because they've paid for the infrastructure.
The manifesto on their site has some good sentiments (drink your local tap water, recycle/reuse your bottles)- my problem is that their product embodies the OPPOSITE of what their manifesto recommends. So yeah, dumb idea.
As someone who lives in the Catskills protected region where this water comes from, I find this pretty amusing. Hey, maybe we should bottle some of this Delaware County water here at the source and sell it in NYC? NYC Pre-Tap? One of the side benefits of being in the watershed is that NYC has bought up all this land to preserve, which I can now hike and bike whenever. Of course, historically, many towns were wiped from the map in order to create all the reservoirs - (http://bearsystems.com/losttowns/lost.html) - so beware the spirits!
Thanks Kenneth @31! That's an awesome article. It gives a great survey of the bottled water industry from its inception. Definitely a worthwhile read.
I just don't like tap water. Furthermore, when areas around me have problems, like NJ having to boil their drinking water last week, or towns in Northern Westchester dealing with contaminated groundwater from IBM plants, it freaks me out.
I don't buy single serving water bottles, I use a water cooler service, which cleans and reuses the 5 gallon bottles they deliver and when I want to take some water with me a fill up a reusable bottle. If people want to drink tap water, they should just take it from the tap.
The tap water where I live is already some of the purest water in the United States, and I kind of got used to that. When I went away to college in a more urban area I couldn't stand the chlorinated taste of the tap water and had to switch to bottled to use for drinking though I usually just got the cheap grocery store brand or I bought it in gallons.
As for New York's tap water's mystical properties, I don't think New York pizza is in the least bit special but the bagels, I'll give them that.
As for taxes being paid for the water - if the NYC water system is like most municipally owned utilities, there is no tax money going to support them. If you use 1000 gallons of water, you get billed for those 1000 gallons of water, you pay for those 1000 gallons, and the money goes to the treatment, transmission, distribution, etc of those 1000 gallons. If you never use the water, for instance, maybe where you live within the NYC water system but somehow have a well, you do not contribute a penny to the public water supply.
Louisville, KY has been doing this for years:
http://www.louisvillewater.com/
Reminds me of the Penn and Teller BS! episode where they have a restaurant offering "gourmet" water to their patrons. The waiter that they've planted in the restaurant offers each of these waters and claims that each has an individual flavor, and the patrons go right along with it saying that they can taste that this one is smoother or that one is woodier or whatever. And out back they have some guy filling up the pitchers from a garden hose.
In 2003, my normally perfect, cavity-free teeth starting showing some wear and tear. As of this date, I have had 5 cavities filled from then to now, the only cavities I have ever had.
My dentist questioned me and tracked down the culprit - I had switched from tap water to bottled and filtered water around that time. The lack of ingestible fluoride in the water I was drinking made my teeth more susceptible to decay.
So I'm here to tell you to drink tap water. Good going, NY.
I drink bottled water almost exclusively. I live in Clifton, NJ; when we moved in, we got a letter from the city saying something to the effect of "For God's sake DON'T DRINK THE TAP WATER! IT HAS DANGEROUS LEVELS OF LEAD IN IT!"
Wonderful. Let me tell you, going through a gallon of bottled water every day or two is super-fun in a town that only picks up recyclable trash once a month.
We used to call the cloudy tap water "Astoria Gray". We'd let it settle and then enjoy!
I'm in suburbia (NJ) about 40 minutes from Manhattan and we have well water. The next street over does not, and they are envious of my street. Dunno how far down the well goes. But my kids take vitamins that include flouride - since they drink no tap water they need to get their flouride from somewhere. The doctor never told the wife and me to worry about it though - I think it's only critical to the wee ones.
I love my munich tap water, it is fresh, delicious and cheaper as some french fuzzy water.
http://www.swm.de/dokumente/swm/pdf/wasser/trinkwasserwerte.pdf
Remember some of the world famous beers are made out of this water, remember oktoberfest ;o)
now wait a sec...I thought Dasani already WAS New York Tap water...?
So buy one bottle of Fiji water and just keep refilling it from the tap. Voila. Non-rolling tap water.
#64 - Why are you giving your kids fluoride vitamins? This is like making them eat sunscreen to prevent dangerous sun exposure.
You might want to read up on fluoride sources:
http://www.fluoridealert.org/f-sources.htm
Lucky for chemical companies, the NY tap water campaign is still packaging in PET bottles.
Unfortunately for Fiji, any threat to the carbon-heavy bottled water company is a direct threat to the island's economy.
It seems that while bottled water marketers may be morally inferior to environmentalists, they're also smarter. Intelligence trumps good intentions.
Late comment once again, but for what it's worth, some carbonation machines definitely work just fine. My host family in Germany had one when I studied abroad as a teen, and that coupled with hippy fruit flavored unsweetened syrups made for some tasty tasty soda. The plain seltzer it makes is just fine too. (If you drink seltzer in a resturant, that's exactly what you are getting anyway--local tapwater plus carbonation.) They aren't hard to use, but I've heard it can be difficult to find CO2 tanks at a reasonable price in the US. Some of them don't take standard sized tanks, so you have to order from the manufacturer. Personally I just buy locally made seltzer in larger bottles and figure that reduces my carbon footprint enough that I'm OK with it. I don't know whether the shipping to get you all the little heavy metal bottles of CO2 actually improves matters over locally made fizzy water, assuming you recycle.
Hey I think it's great to remind people of how drinkable tap water is but I think the real point that we all seem to be missing is that bottled water is the commodification of water. That's what's really frightening to me about the bottled water industry. Tap water out of my own tap is the way I go!
Somebody else already did this but I guess it's a case of monkey see monkey do.
New York tap water is the best! I wish I lived there. Hands down better then any bottled water.