"I wonder which is the most efficient way to produce it at home?"

Maybe we should just quit drinking water and just eat lots of juicy raw foods? :)

My wife and I were able to find a reverse osmosis setup for around $90 on ebay. It's a pretty small unit but included 2 sediment, one charcoal, and then the reverse osmosis membrane filter.

The thing about reverse osmosis is that it "wastes" water. You use as much as 20 gallons of tap water to produce 1 gallon of "filtered" water (though some units can use as little as 3 to 1). So even this isn't ideal from a sustainable perspective.

Not that distilling is any better (maybe worse from a sustainable perspective), you burn oil, gas, or coal (at the electric plant) to produce the electricity to run that machine.

It seems there's always going to be some environmental cost to produce pure water. I wonder which is the most efficient way to produce it at home?

I live in an area where there is no tap water available that isn't treated with fluoride and a Brita won't remove that. Fluoride messes with the thyroid and I have enough problems without that. I have a distiller but there are warnings about boiling changing the composition. I would like to get a water ionizer but that's too expensive for my resources right now. So is a reverse osmosis setup. In the meantime, I'm using bottled water. Sometimes it comes down to being selfish and doing what's best for me.

Great question. I personally have an under-the-counter water filtration system that I use at home, but at work I usually just drink either from the tap or from the Britta jug in the kitchen area of my office.

Trying to live sustainably isn't easy, and frankly for me it's not 100% possible (especially living in New York). But I think the key is that if we keep thinking about these things that we'll naturally come up with small ways to make improvements in our lifestyles that promote sustainability - this is my personal goal anyway.

But what are we supposed to do? I live in New York City and I've seen the water run brown out of the tap. I've also gotten sick off tap water. I try to brita as much as I can, but I also don't want all that fluoride and I've heard brita isn't that good either. And when you buy bottled water, you have to contend with the plastic that it's stored in. So it's a really difficult issue - and just saying drink tap water isn't the answer either. The whole drinking water system is falling apart - and I've heard that municipalities are letting it happen so that they'll eventually be privatized. I have no idea what to do about it - so if you come up with some answers or even suggestions, let us know!