Bottled Water

Which is better? Bottled water or tap water? Well to answer that question I decided to do an experiment. In general there are many reasons why you should not drink bottled water. Bottled water uses many resources and creates huge amounts of waste. It is estimated that it takes over 25 million gallons of petroleum to produce 1 billion plastic water bottles. To put that into perspective, Americans consume about 50 billion plastic water bottles every year, and that is not counting soda bottles! It also produces 1.5 million tons of plastic every year and plastic takes 700 years to decompose. Bottled water also has BPA's that have been linked to diseases such as breast cancer in women, prostate cancer in men, and the development of Alzheimer’s disease in both sexes. It has also been shown to cause resistance to insulin, which can complicate health issues for diabetics. It is no healthier than tap water and is expensive, which I will be showing you in this experiment. Over 1/3 of the bottled water (Dasana and Aquafina to name a couple) is just tap water that has been purified at the source.To give you another perspective, let’s break down costs. If you purchase a 20 oz water bottle at the cost of $1.00, that breaks down to about 5 cents per ounce. Compare that to drinking filtered tap water at home, where you would be paying about 1-2 cents a gallon! Bottled water is estimated to cost up to 2000 times what tap water costs. Believing that bottled water is any better than tap water is just what marketers want you to believe when they advertise and put on labels with beautiful