ALEXANDRIA, VA-- The bottled water industry – like the WWF -- strongly believes that cleaning up and protecting the world’s water resources should be a global priority. It is essential to the survival of both our planet and our industry. Unfortunately, the WWF has elected to attack the bottled water industry –not the problem itself.

In an attempt to draw attention to the need to clean up the world’s water resources, the WWF has chosen to pit tap water against bottled water, while offering no meaningful solutions to the problem. Regardless of whether water comes from the tap or from a bottle, the world should demand it be clean, safe and available for future generations.

The fact is, people are increasingly choosing bottled water because of its consistent high quality, safety, taste and convenience.

WWF makes a number of factual misrepresentations. Here are the easily verifiable facts:

• In the United States, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates bottled water as a packaged food product with standards that must, by law, be at least as protective of public health – and in some cases – more stringent than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations for tap. It is also regulated at the state level with regulations that typically reference those of FDA or are analogous to them. IBWA also maintains its own mandatory set of standards through the IBWA Model Code for its members that are, in many cases, stricter than FDA’s.

• Bottled water is one of only four packaged food products with its own set of FDA-mandated Good Manufacturing Practices that requires a bottling process that uses food grade equipment in a food manufacturing facility. Infant formula is among the others in a select group of packaged food products subject to this higher standard.

• Bottled water has an outstanding safety record. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has never confirmed an outbreak in the United States of illness or disease linked to bottled water.

• Bottlers add value and protection to bottled water products by employing a Multi-Barrier Approach for safety and quality, including steps such as source protection and monitoring, reverse osmosis, deionization, ultraviolet light, distillation, micron filtration, and ozonation. If municipal water is used as a source for bottled water, it typically undergoes additional processing and purification for quality, safety and taste.

• On the international front, the CODEX Alimentarius Commission on July 1, 2001 will approve a Code of Hygienic Practice for Bottled/Packaged Water and a General Standard for Bottled/Packaged Water. CODEX Alimentarius Commission is the worldwide food standards body under the World Health Organization (WHO).
  
  
• All bottled water packaging is recyclable and the industry is an outspoken advocate of recycling. In the home and office/water cooler sector, bottles are captured at an exceptional rate, where they are collected, cleaned and sanitized, reused up to 100 times and, after their usable life, properly recycled into other consumer products.

WWF’s Richard Holland is quoted as saying, "Our attitudes towards tap water are being shaped by the pollution, which is choking the rivers and streams, which should be veins of life. We must clean up and properly protect these waters at the source, and not just at the treatment works, so that we can all rest easy in drinking from the tap." IBWA and its members embrace that position one hundred percent and note that promoting negative misinformation about bottled water does absolutely nothing to advance this vital goal.

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