If you have read my previous post about bottled water, you know I’m a fan of filtered tap water. We use our own tall reusable glasses and fill them up with filtered water right out of the tap. There are many reasons my family has made the switch over to filtered tap water.
Here’s a random list of nine reasons we drink filtered:
- Bottled water is not any safer than tap water. If your bottled water is bottled and sold in the same state it’s sold in, there aren’t any federal regulations.
- Bottled water is simply put… tap water, right from the city water source. You may picture a bottling company dipping water from a fresh mountain spring, but the real source of you favorite bottled water, is the faucet in the back room of a big old warehouse. This isn’t always the case, but often times it is.
- We complain about the cost of a gallon of gas, but we are willing to pay $12.00 a gallon for water. Some things just make ya go hmmmm….
- Speaking of gas… okay. Not so, but speaking of crude oil. Do you realize how much crude oil goes into making the bottled water in a single year? Most bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is made from crude oil. I have read different numbers… anywhere from 17 million barrels down to 1.5 million barrels of crude oil were used in the United States, just to make the bottles. Anyway you look at it, in this day and age of limited amounts of the stuff, that is a whole lot of crude oil.
- In the USA, 86% of the bottles end up in our garbage, filling up our landfills. If the bottles are incinerated, the pollution carried into the air contains harmful toxins, such as chlorine gas and heavy metals.
- The plastic bottles can take from 400 to 1,000 years to break down.
- It takes water to make the water bottles… in fact it takes 6.74 times as much water to make the plastic bottle, as the water you will consume in that bottle. Source: The True Cost of Bottled Water
- Extra minerals in some bottled water are not safe for babies and toddlers.
- Home water filters are easy to use, and filter out the chlorine, and a wide variety of other impurities that may be lurking in your tap water. Personally, I don’t like the flavor of my daughters tap water, but she uses a filter, and the icky flavor is gone! Fresh tasting water is always on tap…
John is holding an awesome giveaway contest on his website. It’s easy to enter and the prizes are wonderful! One of the prizes is a home water filter by Aquasana, what an amazing prize that will be! He’s also giving away gymsoap. So go to John’s contest page for the soap and water giveaway contest!
In case you haven’t already heard, do not reuse your bottled water bottle. The plastics break down with use, and can cause a variety of health issues.
A few of my favorite reads on the subject of bottled water:
Five Minutes For Me 