Is bottled water really worth the cost?

As we all know water is important to our health. For years we have been paying the cost for bottled water because tap water had been contaminated. So what would you say if I told you most bottled water is tap water?

The allegations against the Coca-Cola company's brand name of bottled water highlighted one of the biggest misconceptions about the quality of bottled water. During an investigation of the company, it was discovered that rather than deriving its water from natural springs, as they state on their product, Coca-Cola was actually filling its bottles with purified tap water. Unfortunately, this process is not limited to the Coca-Cola Company and is not always purified. During a four-year study in which researchers tested more than 1,000 samples of 103 brands of bottled water they found an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle - sometimes treated, sometimes not. In one case, a brand of bottled water advertised as "spring water" was pumped from a water source next to a hazardous waste dumping site.

In addition to the issue of what's in the bottles is the issue of the bottles. It's a fact that waste management has become an overwhelming problem. Landfills grow daily to enormous sizes and recycling rates remain dismally low. The number of plastic bottles produced by the bottled water industry and subsequently discarded by consumers has only exacerbated this problem.

Approximately 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year. The sheer number of plastic bottles produced each year is not the only problem. In order to produce these amounts of plastic bottles it requires large amounts of energy to manufacture and transport them. This severely drains limited fossil fuels and due to the bottled water companies unregulated use of valuable resources and their production of billions of plastic bottles they have presented a significant strain on the environment.

So when you consider the real cost for bottled water is the destruction of our environment to receive the same thing that comes out of your faucet, Is it still worth it?