Water – bottled or tap?

Not so many years ago, many of us were led to believe that tap water was bad for us, full of lead, chlorine, and other contaminants. I, personally, was so concerned that I switched to drinking almost all bottled water. Little did I know….

Over the past couple of years, a few groups like Food & Water Watch started looking into bottled versus tap water and found that bottled water is not safer or better for you. To start with, bottled water isn’t regulated as much as tap. Tap water has to go through a series of tests on the federal, state and local level before it comes out of your faucet, whereas some bottled water isn’t regulated at all. Tests the Natural Resources Defense Council did showed that about one third of the bottled water they tested had problems, the most common contaminants being arsenic and synthetic organic carcinogens.

To make it worse, up to 40 percent of bottled water is actually tap water that has added minerals or has been filtered!

In addition, bottled water has a huge obvious problem – the bottles. Up to 86 percent of them are thrown away, not recycled, causing huge amounts to clog up our landfills. The plastic in the bottles can take thousands of years to disintegrate. On a personal note, I found out about a year ago that I can’t eat potatoes (I’m lacking the enzyme to digest them), and my health care provider tested different bottled waters for me. I was extremely surprised to find out that potato was present in the water of many of the brands – the plastic used to make the bottle was partly made from potato, which leeched into the water itself. That made me worried about what else might have leeched into the water (and was what finally convinced me to switch back to filtered tap).

Want another reason why bottled water isn’t so good? We here in the US spent 10 BILLION dollars on bottled water in 2005, and we paid up to 1000 times the cost of production (meaning that companies selling bottled water are making huge huge profits).

So what can you do? I mean, I’ve seen my water come out brown and sometimes I can literally smell the chlorine in it. I avoided water for a few days while I freaked, but I quickly got sick of just juice and bought a water filter. The ironic thing about water filters in pitchers is that they’re plastic! – so I filter my water but then transfer it quickly to glass containers. A bit cumbersome, but I feel better doing it that way.

I keep saying I’m going to get a reverse osmosis filter (that’s the best thing you can do in my opinion), but I haven’t had the time to do the research and am not really your handyman kind of person (the window blinds leaning against my wall for 2 years is a testament to that…), so I’m afraid it would sit on the sink unhooked for a year or two…. But – if you want to get the best water you can, send it off to be tested to find out if you have any problems, and then buy a reverse osmosis filter that filters out those contaminants. If you don’t want to get your water tested, you can get a filter that takes out everything imaginable. Me, I’m now okay with Brita or Pur type filters – I just wish one of those companies would come out with a glass pitcher!

If you want to do something more, join Food & Water Watch and their Take Back the Tap campaign. You can sign a pledge and send a letter to Congress asking them to provide funds to protect our water supply. It’s not the water that’s the problem – it’s the pipes and the aging infrastructure that are starting to crumble. None of us should have to pay for water – it’s a human right.

And if you want to do something really simple, ask for filtered tap water when you eat out. Trust me, it’s now the trendy thing to do, so set a trend in your area. And even if they look at you strange, just keep asking. Many of the top restaurants now serve filtered water. Let’s take back our water supply – it was ours to begin with!