Tweed tap water equals top 4 bottled water brands in Australia

New laboratory tests reveal the Tweed’s tap water stands shoulderto-shoulder with leading bottled water brands in Australia.

me accountable in some way.

The French Nobel Prize-winning author, Andre Gide once said, “I believe that each new generation arrives bearing a message that it must deliver; our role is to help that delivery.”

And in many ways, what Gide expressed, fully pertains to the role or prime function of being a parent – which is to enable our children to realise their full potential well beyond all that we have to give, grant or infuence them with.

While it is a given that we each grow old, a rare few remain children, or at least refuse to allow their inner child to be replaced by an overly serious adult (even the word itself implies something that needs constant ’adding’ to make it vaguely real). Whereas childhood requires nothing more than what it has at any given moment.

Relatedly, the great Herman Hesse once exclaimed, “I want nothing, I long for nothing, I hum gently the sounds of childhood, and I reach home astounded in the warm beauty of dreams.”

My greatest wish, for not just my little 10-year-old daughter, but for people of all ages, is that they remain receptive to the voices and clear messages that children so readily impart. As Jean-Paul Sartre so well said, “In the struggle between the generations, children and old people often join forces: the frst deliver the oracles; the second decipher them. Nature speaks and experience translates: all adults have to do is shut up.”

The comprehensive analysis compared tap water sourced from the Tweed River near Murwillumbah against the 4 most popular bottled water brands in the country for pH, fuoride, mineral content, total dissolved solids and conductivity - a measure of saltiness.

The test results from the NATA-accredited Tweed Laboratory Centre show the quality and safety of Tweed tap water equals the tested bottled water – and has the added beneft of being signifcantly cheaper and better for dental health.

Tweed Shire Council Water and Wastewater Operations Manager Brie Jowett said the results verifed the local community could confdently rely on their tap water as the rational choice for hydration.

“I’m not surprised by these results,” Mrs Jowett said.

“The rich volcanic origins of our soil are refected in our tap water – its mineral content in particular is higher than most of the leading bottled water brands tested.

“You’d be hard-pressed to buy water off-the-shelf with a better mineral bottled water samples.

Tweed tap water was the only tested sample that contained the recommended level of fuoride for dental health, perfectly within health guidelines, and was the most alkaline water tested, with a pH of 7.9.

All the lab results

Filling a 600 mL bottle with Tweed tap water 1,667 times would match the cost of one 600 mL bottle of bottled water.

Mrs Jowett said the importance of these fndings goes beyond cost benefts and personal preferences.

“If you choose content for calcium and magnesium in particular, which are important for our health.”

The test results show Tweed tap water is also lower in sodium than the 4 bottled water samples tested and lower in chloride than 3 of the for Tweed tap water were well within the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines.

A 600 mL bottle of water on the store shelf has a price tag of about $3.25. One thousand litres of Tweed tap water costs less – about $3.30.

Tweed tap water over bottled water, you will save money, reduce the amount of plastic pollution in waterways and help lower the amount of pollution that’s created by the bottling process and transporting bottled water to your local shop,” she said.

“We’ve all heard about the concept of buying local.

“It’s time we extended that concept to water – buying local when it comes to water means choosing tap water, not bottled water.”

Find out more about the Tweed’s tap water quality at tweed.nsw. gov.au/drinking-waterquality.