If you take a close look at a water bottle, there's an expiration date... how can it be that water expires? :o

Question

cuz arent we using the same water that dinosaurs and Cleopatra used?!

total curiosity... :)

Answer 1

The important thing here is the bottle. Either or both of these things can happen over time:

- bacteria build up to a level that may begin to become unhealthy

- chemicals leaching from the bottle into the water are approaching a level that could taste bad or be unhealthy

Answer 2

After an amount of time, the plastic it is in can seep into the water making it dangerous to drink.

Answer 3

What you see is a marketing ploy to make sure that you continue to buy the water even though you don't use it.  You are completely correct, water, per se, does not spoil.

Answer 4

By law, any foodstuff or drink produced for human consumption must have an expiration or "best before" date.

Water does not spoil, and many varieties of canned food can last indefinently, but they still have best before or expiration dates.

Answer 5

k. first of all plastic cant sink into the water. if it did it would bebiodegradable and we wouldnt have so much plastic pollution. The reason there is an expiration date is because the companies that  sell their products want to make buyers 'think' that water can expire so they can buy more water from them. Its just to mess with your mind.

Answer 6

The FDA requires that all consumable products have an expiration date.

I doubt that the water actually expires---it can taste flat/stale after a while though. And there's a chance that if it sits too long in a plastic bottle, the toxins will seep into the water and possibly leak carcinogenic elements, from what I've heard.

Answer 7

Water itself can rot.  It is due to the fact that water is the giver of life.  If you let water sit long enough, it will become a breeding ground for simple life forms.  It is for this reason that up until the Industrial Revolution, beer was the drink of life in Europe.  Beer, being alcoholic will keep much better, and being that it is mostly water, it kept people hydrated as long as they kept consuming it.

The specific problem you have brought up involves the plastic.  While the average plastic water bottle does not contain any dangerous chemicals capable of seeping into the water (though there are cheap companies that may dangerous plastics), that same type of plastic is sympathetic to bacterial life.  In conjunction with water, this type of plastic can promote the growth of harmful bacteria over time.

Don't buy the 'water companies want to fool you into coming back' excuse, if that were true it would be the definition of misleading and false advertisement, which (at least) the American government takes particularly seriously.