"Happy Earth Day" Or, "If You Think Gasoline Is Expensive..."

For some time now, I've been a dissenter of this bottled water craze. Sure, there are times when you NEED to drink bottled water (like when you're speaking at a conference and that's all they give you, or when you're in a third-world country and that's all you CAN drink), but for the most part, we don't need to drink this CRAZE.

Having worked closely with water system operators over the past, well, many years, I have always been taken aback at how hard these men and women work and how little respect they seem to garner from it. These people resent the implication that bottled water is somehow superior to municipal water, when in reality most bottled water is, in fact, municipal water all prettied up and tied with a bow. The fact that many people believe their unbelievable access to clean, safe drinking water is somehow "tainted" is a symptom of our spoiled culture.

The fact of the matter is that municipal water is better for you than bottled water, on the whole. Bottled water is regulated by the FDA, whilst municipal water systems are regulated by the EPA. The EPA has SIGNIFICANTLY higher standard for drinking water cleanliness than those set in place by the FDA for bottled water. For instance, even though some bottled water companies use municipal water for it's "enchanted spring water" source, in the bottling process more contaminants are allowed to enter the bottling process.

Municipal water tastes worse in many cases. This is true (in many cases, although the city where I live was recently voted as having the best tasting water in the US). But that is only because the bottling plants have put the water through ginormous, possibly contaminant-laden filters to take out some of the taste of the chlorine or other chemicals used by municipal sources to decontaminate their water. NOTE, this does not take out the disinfectants, it just makes it taste better. However, the more times the water is handled, the more opportunities for contamination.

YOUR BEST BET? Take your municipal water, and put it through your own Brita (or similar) filter. Fill up your own, reusable bottle. And the beauty of all this? Not only are you healthier for it, you are only paying literally a FRACTION of the cost of bottled water. Not to mention keeping all those billions of water bottles from ending up in a landfill.

More Reading:
http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/nbw.asp
http://www.fda.gov/Fdac/features/2002/402_h2o.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0224_060224_bottled_water.html