Save Your Money: Buying Bottled Water Makes No Sense

For the first time this century, Americans' bottle-mania is showing signs of slowing down, as people realize that "being charged for water is like being charged for gravity", as one tap water promoter puts it. "Instead of being a badge for health and status, bottled water has now become a badge for environmental wastefulness."

To illustrate this, consider that bottling, transporting, disposing of, and even recycling bottled water containers requires a massive amount of energy. Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water required more than 17 million barrels of oil last year: enough fuel for more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year - and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.

It's a good thing then that, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, our annual bottled water consumption, which had shot up nearly 46% between 2002 and 2007 to nearly 30 gallons per person, will grow only 6.7% in 2008, the smallest increase this decade.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution to phase out city spending on bottled water. The resolution, though not binding, received strong support from more than 60 mayors across the country.

A very important, but often overlooked factor is that as more and more people become convinced that the only place to get drinking water is from a bottle, then politicians get less and less incentive to make sure our public water systems are adequately funded, and that compounds the problem.

According to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, "Our tap water is more highly regulated than what's in the bottle." Mayor Newsom, Salt Lake City Mayor Ross "Rocky" Anderson, and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak introduced a resolution that highlighted the importance of public water and called for research into the impact of bottled water on city waste.

Millions of barrels of oil go into plastic bottle manufacturing and delivery, and cities have been spending some $70 million annually on bottle disposal: billions of these bottles end up in landfills every year. Finally, up to 40% of bottled water brands get theirs from the same source as public tap water, although they're sold back to consumers at 240 to 10,000 of times the cost. The Aquafina brand, for example, is drawn from the municipal water supplies of Detroit, Fresno, and other cities.

Fortunately, not everybody is sitting idly. Besides the aforementioned Conference of Mayors, the Think Outside The Bottle Pledge is a collective effort of major national organizations, cities, prominent people, communities of faith, student groups, and concerned consumers across North America that encourages consumers to choose tap over bottled water and support the efforts of local elected officials to do the same at the city, state, and national level.

If you learn that your water has worrying contaminants, you might want to consider purchasing a water filter rather than buying all those bottles and contributing to mountains of plastic waste. For just pennies a day, a water filter can provide safe drinking water for you and your family. You won't pay anything extra for transportation costs or cheap packaging that harms the environment. And you can store your filtered water in a container in your fridge or take it with you as you please.