I have decided to stop buying bottled water. I am buying a good food grade quality water bottle and carry my water from my home water purifier and or from the one at work.
BOTTLED WATER IS WORLDWIDE A 46 BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY
Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water.
Why has bottled water become so popular?
It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.
Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.
from here
Admittedly, both kinds of water suffer from occasional contamination problems, but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times during 2004 alone
Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.
Some water treatment experts recommend not refilling bottled water containers with fresh water from the tap. The plastic bottles may leach toxic chemicals into the water as they degrade, which only becomes more problematic as the bottles become older. Fresh drinking water should be kept in glass or more permanent plastic containers, not in disposable plastic bottles.
from here
"In addition to the strains bottled water puts on our ecosystem through its production and transport, the rapid growth in this industry means that water extraction is concentrated in communities where bottling plants are located," says the Earth Policy Institute Report.
"In India, for example, water extraction by Coca Cola for Dasani bottled water and other drinks has caused water shortages for over 50 villages.
from here
sniff...
