“In just a tough economic environment, one of the first things that a shopper can do is consume tap water as opposed to purchasing bottled water.’’
The sad part is that ending the bottled-water fad took a recession, when common sense should have kicked in long ago.
While some bottled water does come from the natural springs and mountain lakes depicted on the labels, most is just municipal tap water -- water that is packaged and sold at enormous cost. Two years ago, the Earth Policy Institute estimated that each gallon of bottled water costs $10 a gallon to go from the groundwater to your lips. Each bottle of water kicks the environment twice, first with unnecessary plastic containers and then with the fuel that is burned to transport this heavy liquid load to your door, supermarket, or vending machine. The cost is currently four times the cost of a gallon of regular gasoline.
This sham is so ridiculous that the Government Accountability Office, which studied the issue for a House committee, reported this summer that the energy costs of delivering bottled water to a consumer in Los Angeles were 1,100 to 2,000 times more than the energy cost of tap water, depending on how far away the filled bottles traveled.
GAO researchers also noted that Americans say they drink filtered or bottled water for health reasons. Nearly half of state officials around the nation report that their consumers believe bottled water is safer than tap water. This obviously cannot be true when the bottled water is tap water.