Drinking fountain? Or Bottled Water?

Are drinking fountains safe and sanitary? A lot of people seem to think they’re not. They prefer bottled water, which is not only an environmental menace, but also a public health menace.

The whole idea of public drinking fountains has been to provide sanitary drinking water, but it took a while to get it right. The first ones were built in London in 1859 after untreated wastes from industrialization and a burgeoning population made water directly from the Thames unfit to drink.

In response to a cholera outbreak, The Metropolitan Drinking Fountain Association raised private money for the construction of public drinking fountains.

A spigot created a constant stream of fresh water, which flowed into a basin. The basin contained a metal cup,attached by a chain to the structure. Anyone who was thirsty could drink from the cup and put it back into the water.

Common cup drinking fountain, wall of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, London

The idea of germs was not yet widely known, and people simply assumed that running water would wash them off. As public health studies began to demonstrate that the common cup spread disease, almost every state in the US passed laws to ban it between 1909 and 1912.

A new design called the “sanitary drinking fountain” soon became common. Instead of the spigot directing the water down into a basin, it shot a stream of water straight up into the air. People could drink uncontaminated water, and what had touched their lips would flow down the drain.

That design satisfied until it became apparent that some people put their lips directly on the spigot, thus defeating the purpose. The modern design aims water at about a 45-degree angle. A mouth guard above the spigot prevented people from touching it with their lips, or at least made it very difficult.

The assault on drinking fountains

In the 1960s and ’70s it became apparent that some US municipalities’ water treatment was so bad that their water was a health hazard. The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 has solved that problem. It requires municipalities to test the water regularly and report test results to the public annually.

Those reports assure the public of the water’s safety by reporting steps that keep contaminants within legal limits. Ironically, numbers attached to a long list of unfamiliar words began to make people question the safety of municipal water at the same time it had become certifiably safe for the first time in history.

Water bottlers immediately questioned the safety of tap water, one even calling it poison. Much of the public believed the ads and now seems to believe that bottled water is safer than tap water.

By law you have to be told what’s in your municipal water, but do you know what’s in your bottled water? Bottlers are not required to disclose it. Municipal water is subject to more stringent regulations than bottled water.

Why do I call bottled water a menace?

• It became successful in part through deceptive advertising.
• Drinking fountains have begun to seem like a budgetary inconvenience instead of a public health necessity. The International Plumbing Code recently halved its number of recommended drinking fountains in public bulidings. Building codes in most American cities follow the IPC’s recommendations. Lack of drinking fountains forces more and more people to find something else to drink.
• Venues that sell bottled water often see no reason to install drinking fountains. When an outdoor stadium without drinking fountains runs out of bottled water on a hot day, fans start to experience heat exhaustion or even heat stroke.
• Americans now drink more bottled water than beer or milk.
• Bottled water costs about 2900 times more than household tap water — and drinking fountains are free to use. Making bottled water a necessity — or even seem like a necessity — places an unreasonable financial burden on the poor.
• But bottled water is not the only alternative people turn to in the absence of convenient drinking fountains. Sugary drinks contribute to rising rates of obesity and diabetes.
• Water bottles require valuable petroleum to make a container that becomes junk as soon as it’s empty. Too few get recycled. Too many get dumped by the side of the road.
• Transporting them to and from the bottling plant to various warehouses to stores uses even more oil. We import about a third of our petroleum from geopolitical adversaries.
• Plastic litter will eventually get into streams and cause a variety of environmental problems, including local flooding.

A version of this article originally appeared on Sustaining Our World.