Every time I go to the grocery store, I just can’t get over all of the people who continue to purchase cases and cases of bottled water. After all we’ve been told about it, all we know, how can people still fork over money for bottled water? (This is, of course, aside from places where the water is shipped due to lack of clean drinking water, period.) Here are ten reasons to kick the bottled water habit today.
10. Bottled water wastes money. You’ve got to know by now that all of that money you’re spending could be saved exponentially with a simple water purifier. Ours cost less than thirty bucks, and filters are even cheaper. They last for months in our home (a household of four) as well. How much do you spend on bottled water every month? Add it up and calculate the difference.
9. It makes your cooking water clean. How many of you buy bottled water to drink—but not to cook with? If you’re that worried about impurities in your water, you should do so during cooking as well. You can easily get it out of your tap with a filter.
8. Water bottles can leech yucky stuff into your body. Why else would it have that plastic-y taste? Many contain BPA and other potentially harmful substances.
7. Bottled water is no purer than regular water. In fact, many tests have shown that it’s simply packaged tap water. When present, bottled water has, in fact, been found to only have about a 1% difference from tap; nearly half of it is just filtered tap water, which you can make at home. U.S. water is among the safest drinking water on earth.
6. Using tap is better for the environment. Millions of water bottles end up in the ocean, landfills, and pretty much everywhere you look from this waste. In the United States, nearly 9 out of 10 bottles of water are not recycled.
5. It’s easier to use tap water. Changing a filter every few months is much easier than lugging around cases of bottles or re-filling jugs at the store every week.
4. Bottled water itself can be harmful. Some brands have been found to contain pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, pesticides, and other harmful chemicals.
3. Production of water bottles wastes oil. This is a resource that’s already dwindling so low that we are likely to see shortages within our lifetime; yet making water bottles uses enough oil to fuel more than a million cars annually (not including transpiration costs).
2. Using bottled water wastes water itself. It can take up to 7 times the amount of the water in the actual bottle to create that very bottle!
1. The EPA regulates tap water more harshly than the FDA does bottled water. We know it’s generally safer—and it tastes the same once you filter it—so why not start using a purifier at home today?