adminIf you had the choice to pay for a product, or get the same quality product for free, which would you choose?
I would hope the obvious answer is free. So why is it we are paying to drink bottled water when we can have the same quality of water for next to nothing?
Nearly half of all bottled water comes from local sources. Yep, that’s right. Many bottled water companies are bottling water that comes from the SAME SOURCE as your tap water and selling it to you at 300x the cost of tap water. What are we, crazy?
It would seem that way considering every year we spend more than $100 billion dollars on bottled water. And Americans now drink more bottled water than beer or milk. ⊙﹏⊙
In less developed nations where public water supplies can be sketchy, sure, bottled water makes sense. In countries like Canada and the US, our public water supply is actually held to a higher standard of testing than bottled water facilities. This means that bottled water is not safer, it’s not cleaner and it’s certainly not healthier than tap water.
Municipal water supplies undergo thousands of quality test checks a year, taking and testing samples from a ton of sources and checking all samples for a variety of contaminants. Results of these tests must be accessible to the public, whether online, elsewhere or upon request. But the bottom line is that (at least in Canada, and I would imagine in the US too) the results of these tests must be available to the public.
Compare that to bottled water manufacturers who do all their own testing and do not have to make the results of their tests public (wait, what?)… In Canada, CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) only inspects bottled water plants about once every three years…
So tap water gets tested multiple times a day every day. Bottled water gets tested once every three years. Nearly half of all bottled water comes from the same place as your tap water. Right.
Something to think about.
-A
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