Okay, Fine, There Is One Thing Bottled Water Has Over Tap

If you’re like lots of people, you’ve quit bottled water in recent years. We’ve all seen videos of beaches littered piles of plastic trash and photos of seabirds with bellies full of straws and other refuse, and we’ve all read articles about the link between drinking bottled water and ingesting microplastics. It’s almost impossible to avoid buying certain things in plastic bottles—like, where are the cartons of salad dressing, guys??—but bottled water is pretty easy to avoid. Stanley squad, rise up.

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But plastics (micro and otherwise) aside, a new study found that there is one thing that makes bottled water better than tap. And it’s probably not something you’ve even heard of.

Is tap water…too clean?

A new study published in the journal Water Research shed light on the level of disinfection byproducts (or DBPs) that can be found in the various sources of water you may be consuming. Drinking water, in both tap and bottled form, is disinfected before you drink it. This process can form DBPs when those disinfectants react with organic matter in the water. Though the rate of disinfection byproducts found in bottled water varied depending on the label and batch, even at the highest rate it was half of the rate of DBPs found in tap water.

Are DBPs bad for you? Well, some studies say so. According to one 2024 study on the National Library of Medicine’s website, “Evidence suggests that increased exposure to DBPs is hazardous to human health as they exhibit high cytotoxicity, mutagenicity, and carcinogenicity.”

The lowest rate of DBPs in bottled waters were found in spring/groundwater bottled water.

Which makes sense, right? Water from these sources is often treated less than purified bottled water. With less treatment, there are fewer opportunities for those disinfection byproducts to form. Bottled water is far from perfect, but when you’re out and about and just need a drink of water, you’re going to grab what’s convenient. And now you know it may be just a little bit safer than just drinking straight from the tap when you need it most.