A glass of water

If you haven’t seen The Ugly Truth, you should. If you’re one of those people who consider it sinful to utter the word penis, don’t. The film is full of what conservatives call smutty language which seems to be a catch-all phrase for psycho-analytic babble that seeks to demystify the sexual relationship between men and women. If you decide to see the movie, however, please pay attention to the restaurant scene where there is a reference to tap water as being the same as bottled water.

Smack in the middle of watching the film, I recalled a debate that had been raging inside my head for weeks. We drink bottled water at home. We have those five-gallon bottles delivered regularly, we invert the bottle onto a dispenser and that’s what we drink. We fill empty ice cream gallons with bottled water, put them in the freezer so we can have ice. We use an ice pick to break the solid mass of ice into smaller pieces that can fit into a pitcher, water jug or drinking glass.

(No, we don’t have one of those refrigerators with ice dispensers. We used to have one with a cold water dispenser and we ditched it because the hose that connects the water container to the spout got clogged too often.)

Now, we make a lot of smoothies and milk shakes, and we mix cocktails at home too. Quite often. If you own a blender and you read the manufacturer’s instructions before trying to operate the appliance for the first time, you’d have come across a warning not to put in large pieces of ice in it. You have to smash the ice into small pieces before attempting to make a slush out of it so you can have your banana-chocolate milkshake or your margarita.

Because breaking a solid piece of ice with an ice pick to make smaller pieces that won’t ruin the blender’s motor and blades can be a really tough job (sometimes, you end up with a lot of too small pieces that melt away before they reach the blender), we buy tube ice by the bag, too. For homemade halo-halo and maiz con hielo, there’s a place in Marikina where we buy crushed ice. Cheap. Twenty pesos of crushed ice almost fills up a small ice chest. More than enough for an afternoon of iced delights.

So, I was thinking. Are commercial tube ice and crushed ice made from bottled water? You know, we’re so careful about what we drink but we don’t really ask what kind of water is used for making commercially sold ice that goes into our drinks. When we eat out, we order juices. In fastfood outlets, it’s softdrinks. And they are served with ice. Ice made with bottled water or not? Filtered, at least?

Chances are, they’re not. Otherwise, the price of tube ice and ice tube would be horrendous. Which now brings me to that scene in The Ugly Truth when Abby (played by Katherine Heigl) explains that tap water is just the same as bottled water. Are we really paying too much for bottled water? Are we being lulled into a false sense of security?

Let me tell you why we switched to bottled water in the first place. Back when we were living in the city, we had one of those water filters where the multiple filters made of stones and ceramics sieve the dirt and impurities so that the water that drips to the bottom of the equipment is purified and deemed safe to drink. I used to wash the ceramic filter every day because it would turn dark brown so fast from the dirt in the water. That was how filthy our tap water was.

From experience, I already know that tap water can be garbage in liquid form. There’s dirt that’s visible, dirt that you only see if you filter the water and then there are the chemicals added to attempt to purify them at the source. All that spell toxins. So, we switched to bottled water. And it’s a practice that we brought with us when we moved to the suburb. The question is just how much cleaner and safer bottled water is.

There are no regulation standards for bottled water in the Philippines. And we’re talking about a multi-billion-peso industry here so there has to be at least some kind of mechanism for regulation, right? But there isn’t. No one knows the source of the water nor how sanitary the bottling procedure is. Sure the water is filtered but how often are the filters cleaned? Is there a law that says they have to be cleaned every so often? Now, remember my experience with the ceramic filter in our old water filter? How filthy it got every day? What about standards for sterilizing the bottles in which the water is stored and sold? What about standards on water storage including how long bottled water stays safe (if indeed it is safer than tap water) given factors like heat and humidity? What about standards for the disposal of plastic bottles which undoubtedly has a serious effect on the environment?

Earlier this month, House Resolution 1274 was filed in Congress precisely to address this issue. I don’t know how far it will get and whether there will be some serious investigations on the operations of bottled water sellers. In the tradition of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law failing because there are far too many landowners in Congress, I’m wondering how many lawmakers own or have an interest in the bottled water business and if HR 1274 will go nowhere too.

Just last July in the United States, a non-profit group released the data from an 18-month survey of various brands of bottled water and found that only two among the 188 surveyed indicate the source of the water and the process of treatment it was undergone. A number of cities in Canada have already banned bottled water in government facilities where the use of water fountains are being encouraged.

Well, whether or not HR 1274 goes anywhere or nowhere, I think I’ll start looking around for a good quality water filter so we can give up the water delivery habit at home. –Connie Veneracion, Manila Standard Today