Bottled water may just not be the fountain of youth

It looks as though bottled drinking water which sells in the millions annually may not contain what we water-heads think it does.

Through studies conducted by Prof. William Shotyk and co-workers through the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry at the University of Heidelberg, measured the abundance of antimony trioxide in fifteen brands of bottled water from Canada and fourty-eight from across Europe.

Antimony (Sb), which is similar to lead, and a is a suspected carcinogen, is a potentially toxic heavy metal which is commonly used in flame retardants, glass for television picture tubes, computer monitors, pigments, and catalysts for plastics, lead acid batteries and solders. As per Shotyk, it has no known physiological function. It is used as a catalyst in the manufacture of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and PET typically contains several hundred mg/kg of Sb.

“In terms of antimony, there’s no question in anyone’s mind that it’s leaching out of the PET bottle,” says Shotyk of his study on the subject. “There’s no question that antimony cannot be beneficial because our bodies do not require it—in fact there’s no organism on earth that requires antimony to live.”

The dilemma with bottling water in plastic containers is that the longer they sit, they leach more Sb than when they were originally bottled.

“It’s packaged water and if you put water in a package, the package will have some effect on the water,” says Shotyk. “If the water that you’re buying is shipped half way around the world, it’s going to be sitting in storage for some period of time, the longer it’s stored or the further it has to be transported, the more antimony is going to be leached out.”

The team compared glass bottles to water stored in PET bottles and found explaining that the pristine groundwater was found to contain only two parts per trillion of Sb, but with the bottle waters typically showing values a few hundred times greater.

“The reason why we published the studies—there were studies on metals like antimony in bottled waters where people who didn’t take into account the effect of the container,” says Shotyk. “It was a scientific study to tell people if you’re going to study metals in water--like ground water for example-and used bottled water as a scientific sample for certain elements because of contamination from the container, so that’s the point that we wanted to make.”

The conclusion: it was the composition of the PET bottles [containers] that were leaching Sb into the drinking water, up to 30 times more antimony than water contained in glass bottles. A further test was performed by using water obtained from a commercial source in Germany, which contained only four parts per trillion of Sb. However, the same brand of water purchased locally in PET bottles were found to contain 360 parts per trillion. As per Prof. Shotyk and his research team, the same brand of water in PET bottles was purchased three months earlier and allowed to sit for 3 months, yielded 630 parts per trillion of antimony.

Shotyk points out other concerns for bottled water.

“If you buy a bottle of water from some exotic country somewhere in the world, how do you know what’s in that water,” asks Shotyk. “We found some bottled waters that were high in uranium and they’re above the drinking water guidelines for human health—there are some published studies that show that some bottled water is high in uranium—some are high in arsnic.”

It was found that in Japan, PET bottles were manufactured water bottles using titanium (Ti), which is effectively insoluble and harmless, instead of potentially toxic Sb.

As per this study and Dr. Shotyk conclusion the bottom-line is that the water in PET bottles is contaminated and that the levels of antimony rise the longer the water stays in the bottle.

In the release, Shotyk explains that Health Canada allows six parts per billion (ppb) of antimony in water, and once tested water bottled in the PET bottles, showed levels of 160 ppt. Another example of water leaching, was Shotyk examined water near Elmvale, ON, which tested at two ppt and after being transferred it in a PET bottle. After six months, the water was tested again and contained 630 ppt of antimony.

Currently, Health Canada standards are set at 6 ppt for antimony in drinking water. The World Health Organization recommends a standard of 20 ppt is deemed safe.

“If people are going to buy bottled water,”concludes Shotyk, “and pay a lot of money for it thinking that this is the purest water on earth — think again.”