12 Reasons To Stop Drinking Bottled Water.
It is a common misconception for many people that bottled water is safer than tap, plastic bottles get recycled, and no harm is being done to the environment in the bottling process. Unfortunately, that 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, I have assembled 12 solid reasons to kick the bottled water habit:
- American tap water is among the safest in the world.
- As much as 40% of the bottled water sold in the U.S. 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.
- By drinking tap water, you can avoid the fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, disinfectants, and other chemicals that studies have found in bottled water.
- Tap water costs about $0.002 per gallon compared to the $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon charge for bottled water. If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
- 88% of empty plastic water bottles in the United States are not recycled. The Container Recycling Institute says that plastic water bottles are disposed of (not recycled) at the rate of 30 million a day.
- Plastic bottles can leach chemicals into the water if left in the sun, heated up, or reused several times.
- 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). That equals the amount of oil required to fuel more than one million vehicles in the U.S. 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.
- It can take nearly 7 times the amount of water in the bottle to actually make the bottle itself.
- On a weekly basis, 37,800 18-wheelers are driving around the country delivering water.
- The EPA sets much more stringent quality standards for tap water than the FDA does for the bottled stuff.
- One out of 6 people in the world does not have safe drinking water, and about 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from bad water…that we know of. This while Americans spend about $16 billion a year on bottled water.
Have you kicked the bottled water habit? We finally did a few years ago, when we started using reusable bottles and filtered tap water from our house. So what do you think? Think we can encourage more people to get rid of their bottled water?
You may also like:
- Greenwash Of The Week: Fiji Bottled Water.
- New Report: Bottled Water Contains Fertilizer Residue, Pain Medication, & Disinfection Byproducts.
- How To Choose A Safe Reusable Water Bottle.
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if ur scared to drink a little bit of flouride with your water your just a GERMAPHOBE!!!!!
bottled water starts a monopoly like the oil companies once had.
Water is going to lead to the next world war….which will be in the next 50 years i think at the rate the world is going.
Fluoride has nothing to do with germs.
Here at my college, we have corn based bottles that are decompose in 90 days and made of completely natural products. I still use my steel water bottle, but this is a much better alternative to those who believe they need water bottles.
Sometimes there are justifiable reasons for not drinking tap water. The town next to me, for example, had a leukemia outbreak, and studies showed that it was because of the drinking water. I also briefly lived in an area where the water was not only very chemical-laden, it contained sediment (which was not fun to clean off of everything). One alternative to bottled water that I haven’t seen mentioned, though, are the office-like water dispensers. When I used this, there was a place on the way to my house that reused the containers, and customers received a discount for returning the old containers.
Bottled water is convenient, but what I do is keep a plastic bottle and just refill it. The one I am using now I have had for about 8 months.
think of all the bottled water that sits on shelves and in refrigerators in your neighborhood stores, then the city, then the staet, then the coun try. think of all those bottles of water and sodas, and beer, etc. All that water is NOT in the water cycle. it is trapped. all taht water is not in the form of a cloud, vapor, rain, lakes or oceans. This and only this is the reason for the world’s drought. Texas has endured over 45 years of rain deficit. set the water free and the deserts will recede. think about it
my view of purchases and drinking bottled water has now changed. is there a difference or do you recommend a particular filter system?
I personally use the Zuvo filter http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2010/10/21/zuvo-household-water-filtration-system-review/
Whole Foods stocks water from Italy and other countries — in glass bottles. Any data on the percentage of glass water bottles that get recycled? Or how much water it takes to make the glass bottles and/or the cardboard boxes they’re shipped in?
We live in California’s Central Valley where some schools have had to shut off drinking fountains. The tap water is contaminated with nitrates and other agricultural chemicals. No amount of filtering is going to remove these poisons. Contrary to this article, tap water is not safe to drink in all areas. Also, California tap water has wrecked the local ecosystems, and also ruining people’s lives with the way it is managed. So what to do then? I don’t know. I don’t want to drink the tap water but also extremely concerned and disturbed with how bottled water is acquired and produced. It’s really quite frightening.