Tap Water Will Not Kill You

I've spent a good deal of time trying to convince quite a few people that buying bottled water is not only a waste of time, but it also does more harm to the environment than it does good for you body (not to mention your wallet). I hadn't actually ever dived into the science [pun intended] until I saw this article in Newsweek magazine.

Nothing irks Salt Lake City Mayor Ross (Rocky) Anderson more than seeing
people tote water in plastic bottles. In fact, he argues, his city has some of
the best tap water in the country. Several months ago, Anderson instructed
department heads to stop buying bottled water for the city's 2,200 workers and
provide coolers and fountains instead. "For a long time, I've viewed [bottled
water] as a huge marketing scam," he says.


[...]


Most water brands are packaged in a plastic derived from crude oil,
polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Those containers are then transported on
diesel-burning trucks—or shipped in from exotic destinations like Fiji,
generating greenhouse gases. "It's the most environmentally egregious way to
distribute water," says Jennifer Gitlitz of the Container Recycling Institute,
which found that only 14 percent of single-serving PET water bottles were
recycled nationwide in 2004.

The same story also reveals that that some companies, most notably Coca-Cola's Dasani and PepsiCo's Aquafina, simply filter municipal tap water under exotic names and then sell it for $1.25 or $2.00 a bottle. That, my friends, is an outrage.

So what about it? Tap versus bottled? The Natural Resources Defense Council has done the research.

A key NRDC finding is that bottled water regulations are inadequate to
assure consumers of either purity or safety, although both the federal
government and the states have bottled water safety programs.


[...]


This bonanza is also fueled by marketing designed to convince the public of
bottled water's purity and safety, marketing so successful that people spend
from 240 to over 10,000 times more per gallon for bottled water than they
typically do for tap water.


[...]


In fact, about one-fourth of bottled water is actually bottled tap water,
according to government and industry estimates (some estimates go as high as 40
percent). And FDA rules allow bottlers to call their product "spring water" even
though it may be brought to the surface using a pumped well, and it may be
treated with chemicals.

Food for thought on a Monday night.