Some bottled water toxicity shown to exceed law

Bottled water brands do not always maintain the consistency of quality touted in ads featuring alpine peaks and crystalline lakes and, in some cases, contain toxic byproducts that exceed state safety standards, tests show.

The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization with offices in Oakland, tested 10 brands of bottled water and found that Wal-Mart's Sam's Choice contained chemical levels that exceeded legal limits in California and the voluntary standards adopted by the industry.

The tests discovered an average of eight contaminants in each brand. Four brands besides Wal-Mart's also were contaminated with bacteria.

The environmental group filed a notice of intent to sue Wal-Mart Tuesday, alleging that the mega-chain failed to warn the public of illegal concentrations of trihalomethanes, which are cancer-causing chemicals.

"The investigation has uncovered that consumers cannot be assured of the quality of their bottled water," said Olga Naidenko, a toxicologist at the Environmental Working Group and lead author of the bottled-water study.

"Our study was a snapshot of the marketplace. We found some brands that provided good quality and other brands that contained various chemical pollutants. What this shows is that consumers cannot have confidence. They don't know what they're getting," she said.

The group also singled out Giant Supermarket's brand Acadia for excessive levels of disinfection byproducts, but it didn't sue because the Mid-Atlantic chain's water isn't sold in California.

Some of the Sam's Choice bottled water purchased from Wal-Marts in Mountain View and Oakland came from Las Vegas Valley Water District's sometimes-chlorinated public water supply, the group found.

More: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/15/MNGV13H0L4.DTL

comes from a public tap somewhere. Does anyone really believe that they're going to set up a bottling plant at the foot of a glacier in the middle of nowhere and then truck the water out.

But then nobody's ever gone broke underestimating the stupidity of the American public.

Nestle HAS tried to set up a bottling plant at the foot of Mt. Shasta...

10 years of environmental review and a new snail species later...