“Our growing preference for bottled water is hazardous to the planet’s health,” according to an Earth Policy Institute report. “Americans alone drank 7 billion gallons of the stuff in 2004, and worldwide consumption has more than doubled in just six years. To bottle and ship a year’s worth of bottled water to the US, companies such as PepsiCo and Danone burn 1.5 million barrels of oil, enough to fuel 100,000 cars for a year. Almost 90 percent of the plastic bottles end up in landfill, where they can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. In a world in which billions lack any access to clean drinking water, this is an absurd extravagance–especially since both taste test and chemical analyses reveal there’s usually no difference between tap water and bottled water. . . Bottled water costs 10,000 times more than tap water–and is often more expensive, per gallon, than gasoline.” (The Week, 3/3/06)
In fact, tap water may actually be cleaner. Last month, researchers found that some bottled water contains more bacteria than tap water. More than 70 percent of the popular brands tested in this new study failed to meet bacterial standards set by the United States Pharmacopeia.
Fortunately, the slow economy in the US has brought many of us back to our senses. We have been paying $15 billion for a commodity that we already own.