Abstract

This study reports an evaluation on the quality of 54 brands of bottled drinking waters currently consumed in Saudi Arabia. The relationships among eight selected major chemical ion variables (calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, sulfate, bicarbonate and nitrate) were examined by correlation analysis, principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis. Principal component analysis identified three factors, which are responsible for the data structure explaining ~64% of the total variance of the data set and allowed to group the selected parameters according to common features. Hierarchical cluster analysis classified the evaluated water brands into different groups based on the similarity of water quality characteristics. The results demonstrated that the water brands have a diverse character reflected by their chemical compositions and are dominated by $Na-Ca-HCO_3-Cl$ type water. Total hardness values classified most of the studied brands into soft to moderately hard water. Generally, the physical and chemical constituents lie within the acceptable boundaries established by Saudi Arabian Standards Organization, International Bottled Water Association, Food and Drug Administration and World Health Organization for drinking water.

Keywords:

Bottled water, cluster analysis, principal components, Saudi Arabia, water quality,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.