[
David:
What's lurking in your bottled water?
Man: Yeah, I see something-- one right in there.
David:
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David:
just in this country.
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David:
every year on the bottled kind.
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David:
across Canada to test what exactly we're drinking.
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David: Thank you.
Can I ask you a quick question for
It's about bottled water.
And we're asking why do we drink so much of it.
I'll take a bottle of water to work with me.
A bottle of water, it's more convenient when
I go out or I go to church.
I love the taste of it.
It has magnesium.
I like to drink this one because I think this
one is the safer water than the tap water.
David: You think this is safer than the tap water?
That's what I think, yes.
I don't ever drink tap water.
David: You don't ever drink tap water?
- No. - David: Never ever ever?
Never, ever, ever.
David: Do you think this is cleaner than what
comes out of the tap at your house?
Yeah, I would think so.
David:
We're going to find out.
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David:
colleagues are doing the same in Vancouver,
Calgary, and Montreal.
These are the top sellers in Canada,
bottled in places like Aberfoyle, Ontario,
and Hope, B.C., springing from municipal water sources
in Vancouver, Peel, and Montreal.
And from
Some of it comes from the foot of the Laurentians and remote
streams in western Quebec.
It's all ending up here at McGill University at a lab that
specializes in water quality protection.
Nathalie Tufenkji and her team are going to try to figure
out if bottled water is as pure as the marketing suggests.
David: So we've brought you bottles of water from
different places across the country, different brands.
How long does it take to actually do all that testing?
It's definitely going to take us several weeks.
We're going to add a dye to each bottle.
We're going to filter that water and then we're gonna look
at it under the microscope.
David:
of plastic contamination.
Especially microplastics, small pieces of plastic debris
in our environment, all there because of all of us,
like when we wash our clothes and they shed plastic fibres.
The daily wear and tear from our tires,
the break down of bottles and bags,
trillions of tiny particles causing some very big worries.
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Pretty cool, hey?
David:
But this sculpture at Toronto's Union Station
puts things into perspective.
It's made up of 12,000 bottles, the same amount thrown out
every four minutes in Ontario alone.
Much of it ends up in the world's waters.
In 30 years, they say, there will be more plastics
in the ocean than fish.
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[ Crowd Noise ]
There's a shark!
Whoa!
David:
here at Ripley's Aquarium in downtown Toronto.
Child:
David:
what's at stake.
[ Crowd Noise ]
It's actually really bad for animals.
Does anyone know what that is?
- Plastic. - That's right.
Plastic is the most dangerous form of litter.
David:
through the food chain.
Remember, who eats fish?
We eat fish.
Do you think the fish we eat have plastic in them?
David:
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David:
team to hear more.
I haven't been diving in a few years.
- It will all come back to me. - It's been a while.
David:
plastics pose in the wild.
Have you ever seen plastics in the water?
I have.
Unfortunately, even in the most remote places that you think
you're far away from all the lands, of all the populations,
you will still find plastic, unfortunately.
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David:
We're buying more bottled water than ever before.
How did we get so supersized on plastic?
So plasticized.
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David:
with Allison Hunt.
So you have done every kind of marketing
for every kind of product, seemingly?
Every-- every aisle of the store.
David: Every aisle of the store?
Every aisle, yeah.
David:
advertising exec who helped launch bottled water
into Canada in the '80s.
David: Now that you've done that, what do you think of it?
I think if we knew then what we know know we wouldn't
have been as excited to work on the product.
David: Now, what does that mean?
Well, now we're in a different climate.
I don't think bottled water today would be launched.
I can't imagine the meeting.
They would be like, what if we put tap water in bottles.
David:
'70s and this ad campaign for Perrier.
Man:
David:
not only filled with purity, but sophistication and class.
Man:
David:
The campaign that was launching the bottled water
brand was about purity.
Once that was established, then it was to make it a badge
product that you looked kind of cool drinking.
Really no one was drinking bottled water.
And so the second campaign was about just putting the bottles
in situations with interesting looking people who just so
happened to have a bottle of water with them.
David:
in TV commercials and on social media.
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David:
They pay big bucks to get those front
and centre in convenient places.
Funny thing is, in some cases,
the water we buy practically is tap.
Dasani, for instance, acknowledges it uses local water
supplies, while Aquafina's label says public water sources.
It's then filtered to become 'the taste of purity.'
While their profits are sure pure because we regularly pay
dollars for something that costs them pennies to produce.
It's been called the marketing trick of the century.
Would you agree with that?
Well, in a way, yes, because it could come out
of your tap and you could put it in a bottle.
But you pay really high margins on it.
David: You know, on some level, it doesn't seem rational.
- Who said people are rational? - David: Yeah.
Marketing serves to rationalize behaviours.
David: To give you the sense this is a good idea.
This is what you should do.
Yeah, or you--
This is a weird sentence, but, you shouldn't not do it.
David: You shouldn't not do it.
Right, it's like, why not?
Water's good for you.
That's the paradox of bottled water is that,
what's in the bottle is so good for you and the package
it comes in is so bad for the environment.
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David:
where they're testing top brands of bottled water.
Nathalie Tufenkji and her team have been searching
for signs of microplastics.
A special dye is mixed into the water,
then carefully filtered.
The aim is to catch any foreign particles like plastic.
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David:
CSI-type equipment try to pinpoint the particles.
You should be able to see some particles by eye.
David: Oh, yeah, yeah.
I see someone right in there.
Yeah, and there's another one there.
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David:
detection machine, they analyse the particles.
That little tip there is going to be right
on top of the particle.
David: It's going to touch the particle?
Yes.
David: And then it can tell you what it is?
Exactly.
David:
to known plastics.
The verdict?
This graph of this particle shows us these three peaks
which are very characteristic of polyethylene terephthalate
which is the material of the plastic bottle.
- David: PET? - PET.
David: We asked you to look to see if there
are plastics or particles in this water.
What did you find?
So what we were able to show is that
of the 50 bottles that we tested, 30 of them,
we were able to identify that there was plastic.
David: The majority of them?
The top chart shows particles above 100 microns.
How big is that?
100 microns is about the size, the width of a human hair.
David: So it's pretty small.
But big enough to identify many of the particles.
We know that there are different types of plastics.
So, for example, we found rayon, which is a material
used in clothing.
And we found polyethylene which is a material used for making
plastic bottles or caps.
David:
the glass bottles they tested.
This company sells water in both bottles in plastic and glass.
Exactly.
David: And it still got plastic in the glass one...
Exactly.
David: ..although in lower levels.
Yeah, it could be coming from the source.
It could be coming in the bottling process itself,
maybe from the air.
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David:
water is just one of many mysteries
surrounding this story.
For instance, the bottom chart shows even tinier particles
below 100 microns.
And there are many more of them in every bottle.
But why? And what are they?
Yeah, these super tiny ones, I mean, 2,250 in one bottle.
1,100 in another.
Do we know if any of them are plastic?
So, we were able to show using a very specialized
technique that some of these particles are, in fact, plastic.
We don't know how many of them.
We can indeed say now that some of these particles are plastic.
David:
in at least one of the bottles.
Bigger plastics in 30 of them.
As for all the other particles they found...
If they're not plastics, then what could they be?
Well, there could be organic matter that's present
in the source water.
It could be dust that potentially gets into the bottle
because dust would contain different organic components.
David: All of the five brands that we tested sent written
statements stressing how seriously they take food safety,
quality control, and filtration.
Most of them acknowledge that microplastics are everywhere
now and say they want to be part of the solution.
Bottom line, they say, their water is safe.
If microplastics are everywhere,
including bottled water, it begs the question,
what could that be doing to us?
For answers, we're at the University of Toronto
inside a lab run by Chelsea Rochman.
We humans are living in this big experience right now.
David:
More often than not, microplastics.
Where are we seeing them?
Started out in the middle of the ocean.
Now we see them in lakes, in rivers, in bays.
We see them in our seafood.
We see them in animals at every level of the food chain.
David: Should we, as humans, be concerned?
So for human health we really don't know.
The theory is that this is dependent on size.
If a particle is less than 150 micron, evidence suggests that
they might leave our gut and head into different
organs, different parts of our body.
David: And we are seeing particles of that size.
When we have fed microplastics to animals,
we have found things like liver toxicity, so the beginning
of tumour promotion, in the liver of a fish that's been
exposed to microplastics for two months.
But, when it comes to humans, we just don't know.
David:
For me, it's something showing us that the
mismanagement of our waste and our large use of materials
is coming back to haunt us in our own food and on our own
dinner plates so hopefully that's enough for people
to listen, to have some sort of wake up call,
to rethink the materials that we use
and rethink our waste management system.
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David:
bottled water is never sold, school kids take
a lunch break, and drink only from refillables.
You have a plastic water bottle?
Who has a reusable one?
You have got a reusable one there.
What's good about a reusable bottle?
Just say it.
You don't have to-- it won't go in the water.
It's not made of oil.
You can reuse it.
David: You can reuse it?
- You don't just throw it away? - Just wash it!
David: What do you think we can do about all of these
plastics that are in our world?
Yeah, go ahead.
We could remake them into reusable stuff.
David: Yeah, we can try to recycle them.
What else?
Don't use so much plastic bags and start using containers.
David: There you go. Maybe that's the key.
Maybe the key is just use less plastic or try to
use as little as possible.
Right?
We all hear that.
And now know we're even drinking plastic from plastic.
The kids have stopped.
Maybe it's time for the rest of us to take a lesson from them.
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In a world where it's getting tougher to tell the difference
between a real deal and a real scam...
These companies are scammers.
Where it feels like big business is against us.
[ Crowd Noise ]
A world full of terms and conditions.
The debt just keeps on piling on and it's very dangerous.
We got you.
We're going to pay them a visit.
Ask in person.
Are you ripping people off?
Don't you think you're breaking the trust
of your clients?
And we're digging deep, getting you results.
Some of these dealers can be real sharks.
Information from that, I walked in there.
Boom, boom, boom, resolved.
As a kid I grew up watching
Saw your episode on Fast Fashion.
And as an adult, I never miss an episode.
I just wanna thank you for the work that you do.
Thanks very much "Marketplace."
Thank you so much "Marketplace."
You like us.
But what do you think we should investigate next?
The price of cellphones.
More on the insurance.
Insurance.
The scams at the mechanics.
Send us your emails, your tweets,
find us on
We want to hear from you.
This is my "Marketplace."
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