If Coke's Aquafina scam wasn't enough to turn you off bottled water, check out this editorial in today's New York Times.

Most people, if they thought about it, would rather spend $0.49/year and help save the environment than spend $1,400/year and generate tons of carbon emissions and trash. Let's all think about it!

Kim

It is rather a waste. I keep a Brita in my fridge and refill all my water bottles from the Brita.

Americans dispose of 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

Scroll down just a tad to see an example. It's pretty disgusting!

When I can carry a faucet around with me and when there are water fountains convenient when I'm out of the house and the office, I'll stop drinking bottled water.

Yeah, me too. Really, though, the only time I buy bottles of water is when I'm out and about running errands and I'm dying of thirst. Then I'll pick one up. Plus I have a bottled water that after I drank it, I just refilled it with more water. I keep it in the fridge so it stays cold and I grab that one bottle and take it with me when I'm running out the door. But I never buy the big 12 or 24 packs or whatever they are of bottled water for home. I just drink tap water. I'm not wasting money on something I can get from my faucet.

However, there are lots of people who have well water or water that just plain tastes icky and they have no choice but to buy the bottled stuff.

However, I'd like to point out that I *do* agree with the part of the article that says we don't really need to be importing water into America from other countries. That's just silly. And these days, probably dangerous as well.

We can reuse the bottles we do buy. I do that sometimes, but should do it more often!

That's what I do

I've got one that I refill and take with me on the go. There are times when I'm out shopping or maybe traveling and I get thirsty and I'll stop and buy me a bottle of water if I don't have my one from home with me. But that's the only time I buy the bottled kind.

My well water smells funny sometimes. Because of this, I tended to drink diet soda. By buying bottled water I found I drank a lot more water... and it is cheaper if you're switching from diet soda to cheap bottled. These days I hardly drink any soda at all.

I'd go back to drinking my well water if it didn't have that sulfurous smell and I was sure it wasn't full of bacteria. Is there a filtration system that will take care of the smell? Does it work fast? Is there a cheap and convenient way to be sure my well water doesn't have unhealthy levels of bacteria? Moving bottled water around isn't just expensive. It's a lot of work carrying cases of it up from the car.

Finally, I'm sick of the way people are jumping on bottled water. Seems like everybody I know and even strangers have come up to me to smugly imply that I'm an idiot for buying bottled water. "Do you know where they get that? They get it out of a tap. It's just tap water." they say, their eyes full of wonder and joy at sharing this nugget of knowledge with me.

Yea, well I knew that ten years ago when everybody thought drinking bottled was the coolest thing. I'm actually new to the bottled water life.

Did you know that chasing people back to the bottled soda lifestyle is not an improvement on this situation? It's true. Soda bottles also cost a fortune to move around and dispose of. Plastic can only be recycled twice and most of the manufacturers look down on recycled plastic. It's cheaper to buy and work with new raw material. Almost all the plastic fabricated is still around, mostly trapped in huge 200 mile diameter ocean whirlpools far off shore and out of sight. It doesn't decay. It just breaks down into smaller plastic molecules that eventually get eaten by tiny creatures that make it part of their body. As it moves up the food chain the molecules become part of our bodies. Corpses of modern humans and animals already have hundreds of chemicals and plastic molecules that didn't even exist at the turn of the last century.

Biodegradeable plastic exists. It breaks down completely in a couple of months and is harmless to the environment, but it's expensive and is easily damaged by the high temperatures you'd find in a closed up car in the summer.

Did you know they make sidewalk tiles out of used tires? They don't break when you dig them up. Often, gorgeous, big, old trees are cut down because their roots damage sidewalks which then have to be dug up. Tired of replacing the concrete, towns cut down old trees to be rid of the nuisance caused by their regenerating roots, but the new rubber sidewalk tiles can be pulled up in one piece so the roots can be trimmed and the tile then replaced at low cost.

Maybe I missed something, I don't watch regular tv so sometimes I'm out of it. I went and looked up the Aquafina "scam" and saw that the scam was that it was tap water and I was a little surprised that it is a surprise. I thought Aquafina had always said it came from purified tap water? Or maybe I just had heard that a few years ago. I thought most bottled waters, except those that specifically say spring water or what not came from purified tap water? I always thought that the purifiers they used were pretty good at doing their job.

I buy bottled water but I also buy water purifiers and what not. I try to reserve bottle water for when DH and I go hiking or something. My new fridge has a water purification system and I can't say how happy I am for that. One thing I am on the hunt for is decent reusable water bottles that don't leave a funny taste. I know the Nalgene bottles are good for that and I have a few but the ones I have I don't like very much.

Aquafina is 'tap water' that has been put through a reverse osmossis (sp?) filtration process so that it removes the sodium and other sediments. So it's filtered tap water I don't think it's a scam at all, and in fact I wonder why people found it so shocking. Water has to come from somewhere so it's either spring or 'tap'. lol.

Just another spin on the discussion.

My dentist told me a while ago that kids are having far more cavities now than even a few years back. The consensus by the dental association is that it's not because of more sugar but rather from lack of fluoride. Kids are drinking more and more bottled water that normally does not contain fluoride whereas tap water does.

I don't buy bottled water. I have a Brita pitcher that I use with ordinary tap water. I refill reusable water bottles (Nalgene, etc) for water on the go.

Greens: We also have a well and we use a Big Berkey water purifier. It actually purifies the water, not just filters it. Most of the "purifiers" in the common market don't purify (don't remove bacteria and cysts, etc) but only filter for chlorine and a few of the larger-sized things, Brita and Pur for example. Here's a link that will explain the Big Berkey. (I don't get anything from that link -- it just happens to have a lot of good info and more links to explain it.)

Me, too! All of the bottles I've found so far have a funky smell/taste. My nose is pretty sensitive to "plasticky" smells/tastes and I just cannot drink from those types of containers. If you ever find a good one, please let me know. Most people just look at me funny when I say something about the funky smell/taste.

Yes very true, I've heard that as well. Water has been such a frustration for me :laugh: Our city had a lead scare a while back and then I read that boiling water actually concentrates lead and flouride, so I stopped giving DD only boiled water. She now gets Brita water or boiled Brita water (I grew up on boiled water and it's a hard habit to break haha). I drink either Brita or reverse osmossis water as I can't stand the taste of anything else and hubby drinks anything.

I try to store all my water in either glass pitchers or I use aluminum bottles like the ones made by SIGG. I heard it's not good to re-use plastic water bottles because of not onl the possibility of leaching, but you can never clean them well enough and there's a bacterial risk. Sometimes there's so many things to consider it drives me loopy