I hate to agree with you but you're right, bottled water is one of the worst things to have. Doesn't it use 8 litres of water to make that 1 litre bottle, or something? Just do what we did in the old days - fill up your own bottle from home.
I typically buy a case of bottled water once a year. Otherwise, I run an RO filter system that I use for the filtered water. Apparently growing up, drinking out of the hose didn't bother me (OMG it didn't kill me either!?!?), but I don't like the taste of unfiltered water. I also refill some rubbermaid bottles everyday, freeze them, and take them to work with me to drink. I'm still amazed by how many people think bottled = better and they buy cases of them a week.
lol, my town is an old spa town and has a plant that bottles water which is sold throughout the UK and Europe and it has won awards for its quality and taste. So far so good. But guess where the water comes from that comes out of my tap? lol, you've guessed it. The bottled water plant is on one side of the road and 50 feet on the other side of the road (albeit with another bore hole) is the town water works. It's the same stuff. You pay £1.00 a litre in a store or £0.01 for 50 lites via my house taps
I am just disappointed that I was not the first person that came up with the notion that the American public would actually pay $1 for a bottle of filtered water
There are a few times/cases where I've found bottled water to be preferable to the alternative. For example, when visiting a few parts of the states where I find the tap water to taste "funny", and I don't have access to a separate filter. Or when traveling abroad in areas where the content of tap water is suspect. Or when I forgot my bottle and need to get one I can fill up a few times throughout the day. In a typical day, I'll go through 3+ liters of water (it comes from having a 1 liter bottle sitting next to me at work all day)... can you imagine what I'd spend per year if that was all bottled water, when it's essentially free from the tap?
Most bottled water is just municipal water sold back to you at 1000% markup. We can thank whoever imported Perrier back in the 80's for starting the trend. Remember, Evian is naive spelled backwards.
I have a Brita water filter. I'm trusting that my tap water is safe. But it tastes awful. The filter takes out the bad taste. I used to buy bottled water while traveling since in most places the tap water tastes awful, and my Brita pitcher filter is not practical for travel. But then I found a travel version. Same brand (Brita) but it's a one-liter bottle. The actual filter is smaller, and you have to squeeze very slowly to get adequate filtering. So I pack that, and one of my hiking water bottles to filter into. Both pack easily. And now I no longer have to buy bottled water. There are a couple of places I go where the water tastes good, both are sub-alpine hiking lodges which do not chlorinate. And when I was in Scotland, the tap water tasted wonderful, but was the only place I've liked the tap water.
That chlorine taste is why I tend to buy bottled water when I need water and not at home. For example, when I go to Cedar Point in 3 weeks with 2 other people. It's way more convenient, and definitely tastes better than the tap there. Packing a full size brita isn't such an issue, as packing the pitcher that is needed, too. I should have saved my old 2-Liter soda bottles, washed them, and filled with filtered water at home to take with us. Hmmmm, I have 3 weeks, I'm sure I can still get a couple of them filled for the trip!
In the few instances where I want bottled water, repackaged EPA-compliant municipal water is perfectly acceptable to me. Unfortunately, not all tap water faucets meet this standard. (Actually, neither does all bottled water.) Do we know what fraction of the bottled water market is addressing similar needs?
Most bottled water is the municipal water supply, filtered and bottled. Some add minerals for taste. I have no problem with this, since it's like 20-cents a bottle, and I'm sure that it's safe. Why? Liberals hate Wal-Mart and bottled water, so I rest well assured that if there were any detected anomalies with the water then they'd be screaming about it from the mountain tops. 20-cents for water. A buck for a cola. Simple math, really. I have a well and I'm on a co-op water supply. Sometimes they get a little crazy with the chlorine, so I have 2 Brita pitchers (one each for work and at home) and I keep about a months worth of bottled water in ready reserve for storm season and for when I'm traveling....which in my job is almost constantly. I'm not really down with the bottled water=evil thing. If you walk into a grocery store, you'll see aisles and aisles of cola, beer, energy drinks, tea, and all manner of pre-packaged drinks. I usually just drink water. I literally had one of my bed-wetting, tree hugging liberal friends call me out for drinking a bottle of WalMart water while he was drinking a Red Bull!!!
Can bottled air be far behind? Laugh now, but we laughed at water in bottles a decade ago, too. And it's big money now.
It is sad... with some of the best water in the world coming from a tap, and I still see people buying bottled water up here.
An interesting writeup in Science has found links between the health of children raised in rural area were healthier over their life than city raised children. This has been known for sometime, but not the cause. Now the evidence is accumulating that the farm kid's immune system has been exposed to more variation of parasites....and this properly programs their immune systems for quicker, faster, and more accurate responses over life. Of course this is exactly the type of thing that causes all kinds of adverse reaction from those that think raising their kids in an ultra clean environment is the best thing to do....including only bottled water.
It's already been here for some time. I haven't been to one of these bars, but I have known of a few. [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_bar"]Oxygen bar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] The tap water in Atlanta is actually pretty good: I drink from the tap all the time. Some fancy restaurants ask if you prefer tap water, "mineral water", or Perrier...I don't see the need to spend so much for nothing more then a pinch of minerals (I'm into homebrewing, and have noticed that tap water here is on the soft side). Another benefit of tap water in the states is fluoridation: public water has fluoride to help prevent cavities. So on top of saving money from buying bottled water, you can also save on dentist bills.
The plastic bottle is just added insult to injury. I asked a fellow in front of me in line at Costco a few weeks ago why he was buying cases of bottled water. I expected to hear where he sells it, but it turned out he lives off-grid without a water supply. I wondered why he did not buy water in bulk.
Do what I did: Buy a one-liter size Brita squeeze-bottle filter. Easy to pack, for filtering water while traveling. Note: Squeeze slowly so the water does not pass too rapidly through the filter. I've used bottled air. You can dive by holding your breath, and it's fun and I enjoy it and I do it. But it's also fun to dive using bottled air so you don't have to keep returning to the surface to breathe. I like the kind that's 32% oxygen and 68% nitrogen, rather than the regular 21%/79%. You cannot go as deep with 32% oxygen, but deep has never been my thing. If you do want to go really deep you can get bottled air that has some helium added. Oxygen at a partial pressure over about 1.6 atmospheres will kill you, and over 1.4 atm is risky as different people will experience toxicity at different levels. Breathing pure oxygen at surface pressure for longer than 5 hours within any 24 hour period is also dangerous due to accumulated toxicity. But people with emphysema (like my late step-mother) need to breathe air enriched with oxygen, either from a bottle or from an oxgen extractor. There are situations when breathing pure oxygen is beneficial, such as when a diver surfaces with decompression illness ("the bends") but under normal conditions there is no benefit to it. If it makes you feel high, it's probably doing something bad to you.
I've used bottled air too.....in firefighting, and onboard submarines during ten patrols. No residual health or mental side effects here!
