When bottle water first came out, I was dubious that it would ever catch on.  "Why buy something that is free?" I thought.  Nevertheless, we should never discount the power of creative advertising.  It became trendy, a health issue, and it even tasted better.  Think about it.  Better tasting water!  It was a competition of identical twins.

We are now in the era of environmental enlightenment, and the wisdom of bottled water is one of the worst ideas in the marketplace.  Other than portability, which has better solutions, bottled water is a huge and offending product.  First of all, the most commonly used plastic for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year.  Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

After the water has been consumed, the plastic bottle must be disposed of. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. Almost 40 percent of the PET bottles that were deposited for recycling in the United States in 2004 were actually exported, sometimes to as far away as China—adding to the resources used by this product.

Consider also the cost of transporting water from its source to bottling firms, from bottling company to distribution points, and then to point of purchase, and it becomes obvious that there is a great deal of energy used to transport water.  Did you know that about one quarter of all bottled water crosses international borders?

Finally, tap water is generally as good as bottled water.  John Stossel did as 20/20 report on the subject comparing popular bottled water to New York City tap water.  Report the report for yourself because the truth is something worth reading.

There seems no defense for  bottled water.  Look around and see the litter from plastic bottles, and how troublesome this product is to every aspect of environmental health.  It is a wonder that the government hasn't banned it, but the profit of this market with $10.8 billion in U.S. sales) is large enough to buy its way into any pocket.