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Tap water or bottled water?

What to choose: tap water or bottled water? This is a big question and we are kind of confused when we have to answer it.

Recent studies actually showed that bottled water is not as pure as we think. There are many brands that come from municipal supply; it’s basically glorified tap water. Most of us can’t even taste the difference between tap water and mineral water.

The other cons of drinking tap water are:

• bottled water is overpriced. An American drinks 21 gallons of bottled water per capita per year.

I actually made a bit of research and found out that according to the Sierra Club’s research the tap water price is $0.0015/gallon, the filtered water price is $0.13/gallon while the bottled water’s price is $3.79/gallon. This actually means that an average American family (mom+dad and 2 kids) drink 100 gallons of bottled water per year and this will cost them appr. $379 per year. That’s a lot of money to spend on bottled water. When you drink tap water that will only cost you (average American family with 2 kids) $0.15. So bottled water can actually cost more than 1000(!!) times more than tap water. Just one reason why to start drinking tap water.

• it has evironmental issues as well. You have to transport them and recycle them. According to Michelle Mehta’s blog on nrdc.org it takes 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water.

Producing the 33 billion liters of bottled water that Americans drink each year has an energy footprint equivalent to between 32 and 54 million barrels of oil. The energy footprint of bottled water is as much as 2000 times the energy footprint of producing tap water. Manufacturing the bottles for bottled water alone produces more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately only about 13 percent of bottles actually get recycled. About 2 million tons of plastic water bottles a year – 66 million bottles every day – end up in landfills instead of being recycled. While nearly all municipal drinking water systems in the U.S. are covered by EPA standards, only an estimated 40% of bottled water products are regulated by the FDA. That also means that bottled water is less regulated than tap water.

Although there are some people who just don’t like to taste of the tap water or their tap water isn’t safe enough to drink; they can always buy an inexpensive water pitcher with filter that will clean the water. In our house we use a huge water filter (Brita – 3 liter). It is really handy and I can’t taste the difference.

And last but not least here comes the eye opener video about the story of the bottled water:

I hope you are not confused anymore please say no to bottled water.

Happy money saving!

Noemi