Bad to the Last Drop from The New York Times (excerpts).
In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today’s high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?
It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. …
Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water….but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. …
But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.
Well, for starters, I question their math. I buy Arrowhead bottled water at Costco for less than 16 cents per 1/2 liter bottle. That’s about $1.25 a gallon, and I’d be delighted to find gasoline for anything close to that price in this day and age. Meanwhile, I recycle all the bottles I purchase, and I often reuse them first. Granted the plastic bottles have to be manufactured and shipped, so I have some guilt about that. But I DO taste the difference, even between the various brands of bottled water. Most urban tap water tastes like chlorine, regardless of how safe it is, and some bottled waters (think Safeway brand) taste like tap water (because they are). But the main reason I buy it is that I don’t usually drink enough water, and the ease of grabbing a bottle for car trips, or to take along to work, means I drink more water–often instead of grabbing a soda. So for some people, maybe it’s just an amazing sales campaign, but there actually are some legitimate reasons for drinking bottled water.