This is not only happening in America. In the Philippines, drinking bottled water (aka mineral water) is also part of the daily lives of Filipinos.
No to Mineral Water?
America’s consumption of bottled water is beginning to border on a national obsession. But does it make any sense?
Is bottled water really better?
No. Backed by scientific testing, experts say it’s not cleaner or healthier than the water you can get from the faucet in most communities. Nor, in general, does it taste any better. In fact, because FDA standards for bottled water are looser than EPA standards for public water, bottled water can sometimes have more impurities. Most cities test their tap water for coliform bacteria 100 or more times a month, but the law requires bottled-water plants to do so only once a week.Does bottled water hurt the environment?
Undeniably. Fewer than a quarter of empty water bottles are recycled. The rest—about 2 billion pounds annually—end up in landfills and incinerators, by the side of the road, or in the sea.Is there a connection to global warming?
Indeed there is. The bottled-water industry uses vast amounts of fossil fuels to bottle and transport its very commonplace cargo. It takes 1.5 million barrels of crude oil to create the plastic in just one year’s worth of water bottles. “On some of the labels of the bottles you see snow-capped mountains and glaciers,” said Allen Hershkowitz of the NRDC, “when in fact the production of the bottle is contributing to global warming, which is melting those snowcaps and glaciers.”Are there economic drawbacks?
Plenty. On balance, bottled water is incredibly expensive—more expensive, in the case of high-end waters, than gasoline. Whereas its price generally ranges from 75 cents to $6 a gallon, tap water costs from about 80 cents to $6.40 per thousand gallons. In other words, a single 20-ounce bottle of water costing $1.50 would pay for about 1,000 gallons of municipal water—“enough to fill that same bottle every day for 13 years,” says Greg Kail of the American Water Works Association.
Lesson learned? Buy P1.00 “ice water” instead of P20.00 mineral water.
Filed under: Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Trivia | Tagged: bottled water, economics, environment, food and drinks, global warming, Lifestyle, mineral water, philippines, Trivia, usa
This is interesting. I prefer to drink my well-water, double filtered.
Great to see another blogger writing about this, especially another island resident where this seems even more important. I wrote something about this on my site:
http://www.literarylotus.com/2007/08/books-bottles-and-bans.html