Bottle Battles

"This battle with the bottle is nothing so novel" (Elvis Costello):

[M]any consumers associate bottled water with healthy living.

More fool us.

''Bottled water is not guaranteed to be any healthier than tap water. In fact, roughly 40 percent of bottled water begins as tap water; often the only difference is added minerals that have no marked health benefit,'' [environmental think tank the Earth Policy Institute (EPI)] said.
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To be sure, many municipal water systems have run afoul of government water quality standards--driving up demand for bottled water as a result. But according to the study, ''in a number of places, including Europe and the United States, there are more regulations governing the quality of tap water than bottled water.''

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets more stringent quality standards for tap water than does the Food and Drug Administration for the bottled stuff, it added.

Funny--everyone was screaning bloody murder when gas prices went up last summer, but:

At up to $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline in the United States.

I never buy bottled water; never have. I don't have any complaints about my tap water (and who can tell the difference when it's been run through a coffeemaker?) and a simple Brita water filtration pitcher does a fairly good job (to the extent that I can even tell) of addressing whatever meager purity concerns I have. And from what I've read elswhere (as mentioned in the current article), there is no guarantee that bottled water is any "purer," so it seems like a needless expense to me. Besides, if people get accustomed to the idea of paying through the nose for something as basic as water, what will happen when companies start selling bottled air? Then we'll really start paying through the nose, as it were.

People who have concerns about their tap water should put more effort into getting public utilities to address the problem. After all:

Tap water comes to us through an energy-efficient infrastructure whereas bottled water must be transported long distances--and nearly one-fourth of it across national borders--by boat, train, airplane, and truck.
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More fossil fuels are used in packaging the water. Most water bottles are made with polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic derived from crude oil. ''Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year,'' Arnold said.

Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

Once it has been emptied, the bottle must be dumped. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter.