Bottled water should to be a last resort. This $12 billion and rising industry takes a basic element of life, unnecessarily packages it and makes it into a salable commodity.
First of all, don't kid yourself that bottled water is improved. Quality standards for the bottled water are really lower than they are for municipal water supplies.
Nor does it all the time taste better. In fact, if it's been filtered of all the elements that give tap water its flavor, bottled water will taste attractive flat. And if you're drinking flavored water, you are almost certainly taking in sugar or artificial flavors and sweeteners along with it that can deliver more calories than diet soda.
And as far as recycling those cute, obvious plastic bottles that make humble H2O so attractive? Of every 100 water bottles, 86 get thrown away. That's trash, and a horrible waste. By one estimate, it takes as much oil to make those bottles as it does to keep 100,000 cars on the road for a whole year.
Meanwhile, as many as 1 billion people worldwide don't have access to clean drinking water, yet they cannot afford the bottled variety, which costs up to 400 times more. After all, suppliers must factor in the expenses of the bottles and shipping that heavy product.
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