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Canada: Bottled water has Canadians turning away from the tap

Canwest News Service. By Tobin Dalrymple -

Even as health and environmental concerns about plastic bottles continue to flow across the country, more Canadians are turning to the containers and away from the tap as their source for water at home, Statistics Canada said Wednesday.

Almost three in 10 households reported drinking bottled water in their home in 2006, says a study, published in EnviroStats, Statistics Canada's quarterly bulletin on environmental and sustainable development statistics.

"That seems like quite a high figure to me," said Neil Rothwell, who authored the study titled "Against the flow: which households drink bottled water."

Earlier numbers from the International Council of Bottled Water Associations estimated bottled water produced for Canadian consumption doubled to 1.5 billion litres in 2003 from 820 million litres in 2000, the study said.

"This is not presumably a convenience factor. I can't think of anything more convenient than turning on the tap to get a drink of water. Something is driving these households to drink bottled water."

People might be drinking water for "any number of reasons," such as increased marketing for bottled water, or negative incidents surrounding natural sources, such as the spring, 2000 crisis in Walkerton, Ont., Gordon Dewis, a researcher with the statistics agency, told Canwest News Service earlier this month.

In general, wealthier, higher-income households were more likely to get their water from bottles. While less than a quarter of households with combined annual incomes of $40,000 or less used water bottles in the home, a third of households in the $91,000-plus bracket had turned away from the tap.

"For low-income households, bottled water may be a relatively expensive purchase. From this perspective, bottled water is a luxury item that affluent households are more able to afford," said the study.

The report's release comes amid debate surrounding the use of bottled water in schools and in municipalities across the country. In the last month, councils in London, Ont., and Nelson, B.C., have banned the bottle from city offices, parks and recreational areas.

School boards in Toronto and in the Ottawa region are to vote this year on banning bottles from their schools. Several universities have followed suit with "bottle-free zones."

The bans are in reaction to a mix of health concerns, about drinking from a plastic, potentially toxic container, and a growing environmental desire to cut down on disposable containers.

The federal agency's report used data from the 2006 Households and the Environment Survey, and broke down the findings into four categories: income, education, age and dwelling. Of all the education types, households with a member with a university degree were the least likely bottled-water drinkers, with three out of four using tap water as the preference.

This contrast to the higher income bracket was "very interesting," said Rothwell.

"Normally, households with university education are very similar to higher-income households, and they normally share many characteristics, but for some reason, bottled water is not one of them," he said.

Seniors were the least likely to drink from a bottle of water at home, with only 17 per cent of them choosing bottles.

Apartment dwellers were five per cent more likely to use the tap than single-family homes, according to the survey's results.

With files from Tiffany Crawford

© Canwest News Service 2008