Health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices in Barcelona, Spain: A modelling study

Cristina M Villanueva,Marianna Garfí,Carles Milà,Sergio Olmos,Ivet Ferrer,Cathryn Tonne

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148884

Abstract

Quantitative evidence of health and environmental tradeoffs between individuals' drinking water choices is needed to inform decision-making. We evaluated health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices using health impact and life cycle assessment (HIA, LCA) methodologies applied to data from Barcelona, Spain. We estimated the health and environmental impacts of four drinking water scenarios for the Barcelona population: 1) currently observed drinking water sources; a complete shift to 2) tap water; 3) bottled water; or 4) filtered tap water. We estimated the local bladder cancer incidence attributable to trihalomethane (THM) exposure, based on survey data on drinking water sources, THM levels, published exposure-response functions, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from the Global Burden of Disease 2017. We estimated the environmental impacts (species lost/year, and resources use) from waste generation and disposal, use of electricity, chemicals, and plastic to produce tap or bottled drinking water using LCA. The scenario where the entire population consumed tap water yielded the lowest environmental impact on ecosystems and resources, while the scenario where the entire population drank bottled water yielded the highest impacts (1400 and 3500 times higher for species lost and resource use, respectively). Meeting drinking water needs using bottled or filtered tap water led to the lowest bladder cancer DALYs (respectively, 140 and 9 times lower than using tap water) in the Barcelona population. Our study provides the first attempt to integrate HIA and LCA to compare health and environmental impacts of individual water consumption choices. Our results suggest that the sustainability gain from consuming water from public supply relative to bottled water may exceed the reduced risk of bladder cancer due to THM exposure from consuming bottled water in Barcelona. Our analysis highlights several critical data gaps and methodological challenges in quantifying integrated health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices.

Highlights

Bottled water consumption has sharply increased in the last years worldwide (Rodwan, 2018)
While Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of water treatment processes and health impact assessment (HIA) have been conducted previously in the context of drinking water treatment options (Ribera et al, 2014), to our knowledge, no previous study has linked the two methodologies to provide a comprehensive, quantitative assessment of the health and environmental tradeoffs associated with individual drinking water choices. We address this gap by estimating the health and environmental impacts under four drinking water consumption scenarios for the city of Barcelona, which we selected as a case study based on availability of data
Drinking water source share in S1 varied across water supply areas, with 71% of participants in the Barcelona Health Survey (BHS) residing in the Llobregat water supply area drinking bottled water compared to approximately 58% of the population in Barcelona as a whole (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Bottled water consumption has sharply increased in the last years worldwide (Rodwan, 2018). This global trend is partly explained by subjective factors like risk perception and organoleptics (Doria et al, 2009), lack of trust in public tap water quality (Saylor et al, 2011), and marketing by the bottled water industry (Gleick, 2010). Bottled water consumption involves much higher environmental impacts compared to public drinking water supply (Garfí et al, 2016). The growing use of bottled water contributes to the sharp increase of plastic debris worldwide (Geyer et al, 2017), including microplastics (Brandon et al, 2019). The accumulation and fragmentation of plastics (Barnes et al, 2009) contributes to the ubiquitous presence of micro- and nanoplastics as an emerging contaminant in the food chain (Van Cauwenberghe and Janssen, 2014) and the water cycle, including drinking water (Schymanski et al, 2018)

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Conclusion