Get Off the Bottle and on the Filter

Last year Americans spent 15 billion dollars on bottled water and the sales estimate for 2007 is 16 billion dollars. One can argue that it’s money down the drain because the truth has been watered down by some of the largest bottlers. About 24% of bottled water is just filtered tap water; like Aquafina and Dasani.

You can achieve exactly the same quality of water by installing a filter on your faucet at home. If the cost ($100 or less) of purchasing a filter for your home causes you to hesitate, consider this; you can buy a half-liter of bottled water for $1.35. If you filled this same bottle with filtered tap water once a day, it would take roughly 10 years before you spent that $1.35. However, if you purchased one bottle of water every day, after 10 years you will have spent $4,927.50.

GET OFF THE BOTTLE

Besides the incredible savings that you get with filtered tap water, there are environmental and socially responsible reasons that just strengthen the case for the tap.

Environmental Reasons – Plastic is a petroleum based product. The pollutants associated with the manufacture and transportation of these plastic bottles is unnecessarily damaging to the environment. Of the 50 billion plastic water bottles used last year, about 38 billion went straight to landfills. The plastic in those landfilled bottles is worth around $1 billion. 12 billion bottles were recycled, but remember that plastic doesn’t recycle into the same quality plastic. It can only be recycled a finite number of times before it can no longer be recycled.

Socially Responsible Reasons – Like other water from pristine ecosystems, Fiji bottled water is collected from natural sources and shipped halfway across the earth to the US where we already have clean drinking water in every home. Unfortunately, Figi doesn’t have a great public water system and last year Figians fell ill with typhoid casued by contaminated drinking water. When over 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water, buying bottled water with all its associated financial, environmental and social costs seems irresponsible – especially when a home filter gives you the same or better quality water than bottled water.

For more information or to subscribe at the introductory price of $10 a year, go to positivelygreen.com. Positively Green magazine launched in 2008 as a quarterly women’s magazine that covers every aspect of green from eco-friendly vacations to green fashion to green health. With articles that don’t just explain the problems, they outline solutions for busy people who want to make the change but don’t have the time to research solutions.

By Positively Green

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Nidra Z.

6:22PM PDT on Mar 12, 2012

I have a question about filtering tap water vs. boiling it! What is eliminated by filtering and what goes puff when boiling the water? I kind of have an idea they must be different! Different ends to different means/needs but I need to know specifically what each process does to the tap water!?
Where I live to city/tap water comes from natural sources but the municipality puts chlorine? (spelling?) into the big tank where the water is first gathered before being sent to the public piping system! They say it is To avoid any contamination caused by water sitting in a tank for periods of unlimited time and causes sedimentation?! Please enlighten me! Thank you! Nidra from Bodrum, Turkey

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Andrea A.

7:10AM PDT on Mar 11, 2012

Yep, I do it.

Selective C.

3:24AM PDT on Mar 11, 2012

I drink from the tap, but filter it first too.

LMj S.

7:31PM PST on Mar 10, 2012

love my water filter, thank you for info and sharing!

Gina D.

6:44AM PDT on Oct 8, 2011

Tap water from a glass bottle. This has served me well for nearly 70 years. Adam's Ale - perfick!!!

Renee K.

5:54AM PDT on Oct 7, 2011

It takes so long for plastic to disinagrate. Pets Suppy uses bags that are made of some sort of bag, that's biodegradable. If they don't want to give up the plastic water bottles, then should reqire that the bottle have a retun fee. In Michigan, we have 10 cent return for the cans and bottles. They do not have a return on uncarbonated bottles. I bought cloth bags for shopping, and I got a pitches. People need to take action now before it's too late.

Sonny H.

10:26PM PDT on Oct 3, 2011

Thanks!

Gordana R.

11:11PM PST on Feb 28, 2011

useful article

David N.

10:08PM PST on Feb 6, 2011

Thanks for the article. I have drank filtered water for about 25 years and tap water before that. It's crazy to pay for bottled, not to mention the waste of bottles.

Kath R.

4:18AM PST on Feb 2, 2011

I take water around with me using a recycled glass bottle filled with Brita filtered water.