MEXICO CITY — It’s a simple warning — don’t drink the tap water — and Mexicans take it to heart as much as any foreign tourist does.
Mexicans drink more bottled water than the citizens of any other country do, an average of 61.8 gallons per person each year, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp., a consultancy. That’s far higher than Italy and more than twice as much as in the United States.
A rising mistrust of tap water is behind the thirst for bottled water. Other factors also are at play, however, including clever advertising campaigns by multinational corporations and the failure of the Mexican government to provide timely data on water safety.
The boom in bottled water has an underside, too. Empty plastic water bottles litter landfills and roadsides at a rate that alarms consumer and environmental groups. Recycling experts say that only about one-eighth of the 21.3 million plastic water and soft-drink bottles that are emptied each day in Mexico get recycled.
Mexicans weren’t always as distrustful of tap water as they are these days.
“Twenty years ago, there were drinking fountains in all the public schools and in most parks,” said Claudia Campero, a Mexico representative of Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group. Now, such fountains are rare.
Some municipal water systems in Mexico have fallen into disrepair, including in the capital, where a 1985 earthquake that killed more than 10,000 people broke numerous water mains. The city siphons water from the underlying aquifer faster than rainfall can replenish it, causing the city, much of which is built on an ancient lakebed, to sink, which puts additional stress on leaky water mains. About 30 percent of the city’s water is lost to leakage.
Not all the water is bad, though. Some provincial cities have improved their water systems, and Environment Ministry officials say that 85 percent of the water coursing through municipal systems is potable.
