This website asks a lot of important questions about bottled water but there are two main ones: Does it really taste better than tap water? And what impact does the manufacture of those bottles and their transport, filling and disposal have on the environment?
To the first question, I have an easy, almost inarguable answer. Bottled water tastes much better than the water that comes out of my faucets. The H2O here is awful…so awful that I've twice had experts from the D.W.P. in because I couldn't believe that what was emanating from my taps was acceptable. They tested it and said it was not dangerous in any way…but both admitted that it sure tasted like something you shouldn't be swallowing. The last guy, a year or so ago, explained that some work had been done on pipes about a mile away and that had kicked up a lot of old sediment and sent harmless but foul-tasting elements into the local water supply. "It should settle down in a few months," he said but this has not happened.
So that's the answer to the first question. It annoys me a bit when people tell me tap water is indistinguishable from bottled water. Not around here, it isn't. The fact that they may be equally good in your home is irrelevant to my life. That's like me telling someone in Germany where it's currently flooding, "Don't be silly. It's 78 degrees and clear outside."
Oddly enough, that website doesn't seem to even believe itself on this point. In one section, they say…
In an interesting study conducted by Showtime television, the hosts found that 75% of tested New York City residents actually preferred tap water over bottled water in a blind taste test. While taste is certainly highly subjective, this study shows that bottled water essentially holds nothing over tap water. In many cases, bottled water is no purer than tap water, and it may not even taste better.
I think they're referring to a survey on the Penn & Teller Bullshit show…which is, again, irrelevant to my life. Every time I've been to Manhattan, the tap water has tasted pretty good, but I can't keep flying east when I need to take my vitamins. In any case, most of the same site is devoted to pushing the idea of installing water filters because, as they say…
Tap water is nowhere near free from dangerous contaminants.
So far, I haven't had much luck with water filters. Brita hasn't made the filter that can turn my water into a reasonable facsimile of Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water. I suspect you could put my water through a Brita filter and then pour that through an Aquapure filter and run the output of that through a Pur filter and then have it all treated by my friendly neighborhood Culligan man…and it still wouldn't be decent water. But I am doing some further investigation on this point. Maybe I'll find a filtration system that works.
As for the second question, that's a different matter. Are all those plastic bottles an ecological problem? I want to read up more on that because I go through an awful lot of them and if they're filling the landfills to capacity, that's a dandy reason to do something different. I'd also like to know about the effects of water filtration. (I have the feeling that the folks who put up that website to which I'm linking have something to do with that industry. In any case, they don't address that.)
I gave up carbonated beverages in February of '06 and most fruit juices after my surgery the following May. My consumption of bottled water has probably quintupled (at least!) since then. So maybe I'm overdue to get smarter about this stuff.