Some good reasons why... and that aside from your wallet
By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
It is a common misconception for many people that bottled water is safer than tap, that the majority of the plastic bottles get recycled, and no harm is being done to the environment during the extraction and in the bottling process.
Unfortunately, nothing could not be further from the truth!
So in case you either needed more reasons to stop drinking bottled water, or a few extra talking points when discussing with your friends, here are a few solid reasons to kick the bottled water habit:
The tap water in the great majority of developed countries, such as the USA, Britian, Germany, Netherlands, etc., is safe and American, British and German tap water is among the safest in the world.
As much as 40% of the bottled water sold in the U.S. (and we have no idea as to other countries) is just filtered tap water anyway. Be sure to check the label and look for “from a municipal source” or “community water system”, which just means it is tap water. In many European countries there is no such label and thus we may never know.
By drinking tap water, you can avoid the fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, disinfectants, and other chemicals that studies have found in bottled water. Thames Water tests its water in all its plants for quality and safety at least eight times in any twenty-four hour period, and that is also legal requirement for municipal water. There is no such requirement for bottled water.
Tap water costs about $0.002 per gallon compared to the $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon charged for bottled water. If the water we use at home would cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000. Mad isn't it?
88% of empty plastic water bottles in the United States are not recycled and I am sure it is a similar percentage in the UK. The Container Recycling Institute says that plastic water bottles are disposed of (not recycled) at the rate of 30 million a day. And that is just in the United States. I dread to think how it adds up on a worldwide basis. Plastic bottles can leach chemicals into the water if left in the sun, heated up, or reused. PET bottles should never be reused for any drinks for humans. Many people, including parents, reuse such PET water bottles again, and again and again, totally unaware of the fact that they leach the now infamous BPA.
Production of the plastic (PET or polyethylene) bottles to meet our demand for bottled water takes the equivalent of about 17.6 million barrels of oil (not including transportation costs) and that equals about the amount of oil required to fuel more than one million vehicles in the United States each year. Around the world, bottling water uses about 2.7 million tons of plastic…each year.
Bottled water companies mislead communities into giving away their public water in exchange for dangerous jobs and it can take nearly 7 times the amount of water in the bottle to actually make the bottle itself. On a weekly basis, around 40,000 large 40ft trucks of the 18-wheeler kind are driving around the country delivering water, and once again those figures are just for the USA alone.
The authorities set, as I have indicate already, much more stringent quality standards for tap water than they do for the bottled stuff.
There is no need for bottled water in the great majority of locations in the developed world and it is a total waste of money and resources, yours and those of the Planet.
I must say that I have never been a great consumer of bottled water as I have always refused to pay for something that I can get for free or almost free, and I always now have a receptacle, called a bottle, with me so I can fill it at refilling stations and public fountains – not many of the latter around anymore really, though they used to once abound. Therefore I carry water with me from the start when I go out into London or elsewhere so that I do not have to buy bottled water.
There are now so many good ways of carrying you tap water that spending around $2 on a half a liter to a liter of bottled water does not make sense at all. Bottles of all kinds and materials can be had and, in all honesty, there are strong glass bottles too that you can simply upcycle as a bottle for use with your tap water, if you do not want to buy a bottle. Glass is always safe – as far as water use goes – as it does not contain any nasty chemicals.
The only drawback with ordinary glass and thus with upcycled bottles, such as Snapple lemonade bottles, is the fact that glass is breakable. However, making a nice little coat for it, ideally a padded one, and things should be fine, as long as you are nor throwing it about.
On the other hand, if you want to purchase a bottle for use with your tap water than the choice is rather legion. There are stainless steel ones, there are toughened and laminated glass ones, there are BPA-free (still questionable) hard plastic ones and then there are HDPE and LDPE bottles, and then there is the Aquaqtina.
© 2011
