CONSUMERISM: Bird-Dogging the Bottlers

Horse trainers feed it to their thoroughbreds during the racing season, fish lovers raise their most prized species in it, horticulturalists nurture exotic African violets with it-and people drink it. It is bottled water, and it is used for all those things because it is supposed to be purer than the stuff that comes from the tap.

As more and more Americans turn on their faucets only to have heavily chlorinated and sometimes foaming water spill into their glasses, the sales of bottled water soar. In the past five years, home consumption has increased by more than 50%, and is still rising by a snappy 10% per year. But no overall set of governmental standards or regulations has emerged to ensure that bottled water is not simply tap water in disguise, or something no better.

Scare Story. One reason for the delay is jurisdictional confusion within Washington's bureaucracy. Officials cannot agree whether bottled water is a "food" under the auspices of the Food and Drug Administration or should more properly be considered part of a community's water supply and therefore in the purview of the Environmental Protection Agency. A bill pending in Congress, sponsored by Democratic Representative John S. Monagan of Connecticut, would help solve the dilemma by giving the EPA authority to set uniform standards for all bottled water.

The Federal Trade Commission, which watches over product advertising, will have an additional regulatory role no matter what the outcome. Some promotional campaigns for bottled water have sought to boost sales by attacking the quality of municipal drinking water. Schweppes Ltd. found the reception chilly when it developed plans to test-market bottled water in Philadelphia with ads that slurred the city's water supply. Fear of official complaints prompted the company to abandon the project before it got started.

FTC attorneys are concerned about deceptive labeling and advertising of the water inside the bottle. To well-traveled Americans, bottled water evokes exotic, health-giving European spas. In the U.S., however, only 1% of bottled water is imported-and, of course, now subject to the 10% surtax. Only half of the bottled water sold in the U.S. comes from underground springs. The rest is tap water that has been purified and elaborately filtered. But ads for the finished product often make it sound as if it had gurgled fresh from the ground in some sylvan mountain glen. Says one FTC attorney who has handled half a dozen such cases in the past year: "Usually the bottled water in question is represented as being fresh spring water, but is in fact only vvell-filtered tap water. There is nothing in any way unhealthy about it; it's just not spring water."