Every now and then, during the question period at the end of my talks, I get asked how long bottled water lasts and whether you can keep it past the expiration date; and I experience temporary panic. You see, I have typically kept my bottled water a year or two past the printed expiration date, because I�ve found it to be such a hassle to lug 14 gallons (in our case; 1 gallon per person per day for 7 days*) to a sink, empty them (it takes a LONG TIME), discard the jugs, and lug 14 more gallons from the store and individually bag them to put them on the shelf in our closet! I figure that even if it was unhealthy to frequently drink water that had been stored too long in plastic jugs, my emergency water is for an extremely rare event and I won�t mind a few days of it.
(*QuakePrepare.com recently pointed out that the Red Cross now suggests 14 days of supplies...but we don�t have enough space!)
However, I worry about giving this advice to people, because while I have felt that it is probably not a problem, I don�t know for sure. I would not want to counsel people to drink water that was potentially contaminated with leached chemicals. So, I answer that the expiration date on those gallon jugs typically gives you a year or two, and that I tended to over-store mine but this was not official advice and I could not guarantee that the water was healthy.
Well, yesterday I was reading a back issue of Consumer Reports (from October 2012), and they had a letter in their �ask our experts� column asking how long water should be used after purchase and whether the expiration date was meaningful. To my surprise, they said that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considered bottled water to have an indefinite storage life as long as it was produced in accordance with regulations and was unopened. Let�s take a closer look at this, because not having to rotate out all this water would avoid a major hassle.
I found an article on the FDA website from February/March 2002 about bottled water that concurred with what Consumer Reports said. Among the notable text:"In the U.S., bottled water and tap water are regulated by two different agencies; the FDA regulates bottled water and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates tap water... FDA regulates bottled water as a food... Bottled water is considered to have an indefinite safety shelf life if it is produced in accordance with CGMP [Current Good Manufacturing Process] and quality standard regulations and is stored in an unopened, properly sealed container. Therefore, FDA does not require an expiration date for bottled water. However, long-term storage of bottled water may result in aesthetic defects, such as off-odor and taste. Bottlers may voluntarily put expiration dates on their labels...�
