Stop drinking bottled water

One of the most important healthy eating habits we stress on Healthy Eating News is to drink plenty of water every day. But where do you get that water from? If you are buying bottled water, you are wasting your money on a costly, unsustainable product that does not provide added health benefits and is destroying the environment. Here are several reasons you should stop drinking bottled water:

Bottled water isn't a good value

If you are getting your bottled water by the bottle, you are probably paying twice as much as a gallon of gasoline. Gasoline has to be pumped out of the ground in the form of crude oil, shipped to a refinery (often halfway across the world), and shipped again to your local filling station. Many bottled waters are only filtered tap water and most tap water costs less than one cent per gallon! Why are you paying over 600 times as much as you need to? Even if you buy water at $1.00 per gallon that is more than 100 times as much as you need to pay! Don’t complain about the price of gasoline if you pay for bottled water.

Bottled Water is no healthier than tap water

You are fooling yourself if you think bottled water is healthier than tap water. Your tap water falls under the regulatory authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, and is regularly inspected for bacteria and toxic chemicals. Your tap water is filtered, sanitized, and tested for your safety. If you want to know how your community scores, Check out the Environmental Working Group's National Tap Water Database. Bottled water, however, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and requires no such practices and has no oversight with regard to contaminants unless it is shipped over state lines.

In March 1999, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report called "Bottled Water, Pure Drink or Pure Hype?" NRDC's report points out that as much as 40% of all bottled water comes directly from a city water system, just like tap water. The report also focuses on the fact that 60% to 70% of all bottled water sold in the U.S. is exempt from the FDA's bottled water standards, because the federal standards do not apply to water bottled and sold within the same state. Unless the water is transported across state lines, there are no federal regulations that govern its quality. Two of the largest tap water bottlers, Pepsi's Aquafina and Coca-Cola Co's Dasani are both made from purified water sourced from public reservoirs.

Bottled water is a waste

Bottled water produces up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year and, according to Food and Water Watch, that plastic requires up to 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce. Although the plastic used to bottle beverages is of high quality and is in demand by recyclers, over 80 percent of plastic bottles are simply thrown away. Only about 12 percent of "custom" plastic bottles, a category dominated by water, were recycled in 2003, according to industry consultant R.W. Beck, Inc. That's 40 million bottles a day that went into the trash or became litter.

Plastic waste is now at such a volume that vast eddies of current-bound plastic trash now spin endlessly in the world's major oceans. This represents a great risk to marine life, killing birds and fish which mistake our garbage for food. Making plastic bottles for water uses up to 2,000 times more energy to produce and deliver than tap water. Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60-watt light bulb for up to six hours. Multiply that by 40 million bottles a day and you can see what a waste it is to drink water from plastic water bottles and not recycle them.

The corporatization of water

In the documentary film Thirst, authors Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman demonstrated the rapid worldwide privatization of municipal water supplies, and the effect these purchases are having on local economies. Water is being called the "Blue Gold" of the 21st century. Thanks to increasing urbanization and population, shifting climates and industrial pollution, fresh water is becoming humanity's most precious resource. Multinational corporations are stepping in to purchase groundwater and distribution rights wherever they can, and the bottled water industry is an important component in their drive to commoditize what many feel is a basic human right: the access to safe and affordable water.


What should you do?

1)  Adopt a great alternative to bottled water: buy a stainless steel water bottle and use it.

 2)  If you don't like the way your local tap water tastes buy an inexpensive carbon filter. It will make most tap water taste sparkling fresh at a fraction of bottled water's cost.

3)  Conserve water wherever possible, and keep up with local water issues.

4)  Consider taking Food and Water Watch's No Bottled Water Pledge.


Want to know more? Start with the Sierra Club's fact sheet on bottled water.