by J M K

Created on: May 02, 2008

I know many of us, myself included, occasionally drink bottled water. We may think it's convenient, it's healthy, it's safer than tap water but this isn't all true. Bottled water is detrimental to our environment, our health, and certainly doesn't help our pocketbooks either. My message is simple: Drink tap water.

What is in bottled water? Recently the Coca-Cola Company has taken some heat for the contents of it's Dasani water bottles. The picture on the bottle led many consumers to believe the bottles were filled with spring water while in fact it was filled with purified tap water. If you have a purifier on your kitchen faucet, you've been drinking Dasani water for free. All About Water, an online resource, has said "An estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle-sometimes further treated, sometimes not."

You may be thinking about the recent tap water scare. Many news agencies reported stories about contaminates in tap water. The small print in many of those stories announced that the minimal amount of pharmaceuticals and other contaminants found in the public water system posed no threat to our health.

Now think about this. Tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Known for the strict standards the EPA tests tap water four times as often as the FDA tests bottled water. Loopholes in the FDA's policies allow water that is bottled and sold in the same state to go virtually unregulated. So we don't even know what is in many of those bottles?

The National Resources Defense Council concluded, "While much tap water is indeed risky, having compared available data, we conclude that there is no assurance that bottled water is any safer than tap water."

Bottled water costs 1,000 times more to the consumer than tap water. In 2002, Americans paid 7.7 billion for bottled water. At the brink of a recession, think how far money saved from drinking tap water can go. Money can be used to reduce the carbon footprints left by the bottling companies. And, money is not the only resource wasted by manufacturing bottled water. Twice the amount of water bottled is wasted in the processing of plastic bottles. The fuel that it costs to produce, transport, and then store refrigerated bottle water in one year is enough fuel to heat 100,000 this winter. The damage from the harmful emissions being released into the air during this process can not be reversed.

To add to the big-foot sized carbon foot print the bottled water industry is already leaving us, 90% of empty water bottles are not recycled; according to the Container Recycling Institute, that amounts to 30 million bottles a day. One plastic bottle takes 1,000 years to bio-degrade.

If you think you can taste the difference between bottled water and tap water, I challenge you to take a taste test. Fill up one cup with bottled water and the other with tap, put them in the fridge until they are the same temperature and test yourself. I recently played this game with 12 friends, two brands of bottled water and tap water; less than half were able to correctly guess the tap water. In a taste test done by Good Morning America, New York City tap water was chosen as the favorite over many popular brands of bottled water.

Save money, save the environment and go for the surely safe choice. Recycle your water bottles and go for the tap!

Sources:
All About Water, http://www.allaboutwater.org/environment.html
Drink Tap, http://www.drinktap.org/consumerdnn/

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