When people hear the words tap water, the first words that come to mind are usually, "dirty," sink," "pipes," and, "nasty." Perhaps this is the reason that bottled water is consumed largely around the entire country.

After all, who wants to drink water that comes for a pipe that we use to wash ourselves and our dishes? For those of you who may be uniformed, tap water is running water that comes from indoor plumbing. We use tap water to wash our dishes, our clothes, our hands, and even our whole bodies! Well, contrary to popular belief, drinking water from the tap is not dirty. Tap water is actually very clean and sanitary, it goes through many water purification systems before we even get the chance to turn the sink's handle and let the water come gushing out of the faucet.

So, why is there such a negative stigma attached to drinking tap water? I believe that most of it comes from hearsay and paranoia. People think that if it comes from a faucet then it is automatically less clean than the water that they can buy in a fountain. Also, since tap water comes through pipes, people assume that there could be some sort of contamination of the water before it reaches the faucet even though there are many steps that are taken in order to prevent this from happening. New York City has some of the cleanest tap water in the world, but it is not utilized because people would rather spend money on bottled water.

So, why does everyone drink bottled water? Well, it's supposedly cleaner than the tap and tastes better too. It also comes in convenient plastic bottles that people can carry with them anywhere – the work, while excising, at home….the list just goes on and on! Well, you know those convenient little plastic bottles, while they may be quite helpful to you and anyone else using them, they are not quite so useful to the environment. In fact, all the plastic bottles that we are using are causing harm to the environment because it takes extremely long for them to finally degrade into the Earth.

In fact, there are many instances where the plastic bottles or plastics in general cannot degrade at all; these plastics will never degrade. However, there are certain instances where plastics can degrade, but it is only when certain conditions are met – such as extreme heat. However, even when these conditions are met, these plastics may not degrade for 1000 years. You can leave plastic to degrade for 50 years, and only the color would be gone, this says a lot about how long it would take for actual plastic to degrade.

Even with all of these problems, people still choose to buy bottled water. Perhaps it is because they don't realize what they're doing is having such a huge impact on the environment? After all, it's only them that are buying the water bottles. In reality, with everyone buying water bottles and thinking that what they're doing is not doing a lot, the impact actually becomes much, much greater

The bottom line is that we need to change the negative attitudes about tap water so that we can get more people drinking it. If everyone began drinking tap water than a large supply of harmful plastic would stop being produced and the Earth would greatly benefit. Remember to drink tap water, just by doing that you will doing your part to save the environment.

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