water bottles.....

This will make you think twice about buying bottled water..... I switched back to tap after some salesman pitched me a purification system, ran some "test" and showed me my tap water was actually cleaner then my bottled water. I DIDN't get the purification system but at least I can save money on water! I bought one of those reusuable water bottles made out of that "good" plastic.

From the San Francisco Chronicle- Sunday, February 18, 2007

San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents enjoy some of the nation's
highest quality drinking water, with pristine Sierra snowmelt from the Hetch
Hetchy reservoir as our primary source. Every year, our water is tested more
than 100,000 times to ensure that it meets or exceeds every standard for
safe drinking water. And yet we still buy bottled water. Why?

Maybe it's because we think bottled water is cleaner and somehow better, but
that's not true. The federal standards for tap water are higher than those
for bottled water.

The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words
such as "pure" to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic and chlorine.
Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than
tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a San Franciscan can
receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be
labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is. But even that
doesn't dampen the demand.

Clearly, the popularity of bottled water is the result of huge marketing
efforts. The global consumption of bottled water reached 41 billion gallons
in 2004, up 57 percent in just five years. Even in areas where tap water is
clean and safe to drink, such as in San Francisco, demand for bottled water
is increasing -- producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities
of energy. So what is the real cost of bottled water?

Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging,
shipping, marketing, retailing and profit. Transporting bottled water by
boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels.
More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally
each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles
away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy
our demand for the chic and exotic. These are truly the Hummers of our
bottled-water generation. As further proof that the bottle is worth more
than the water in it, starting in 2007, the state of California will give 5
cents for recycling a small water bottle and 10 cents for a large one.

Just supplying Americans with *plastic* water *bottles* for one year
consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars
off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
according to the Container Recycling Institute. In contrast, San Francisco
tap water is distributed through an existing zero-carbon infrastructure:
plumbing and gravity. Our water generates clean energy on its way to our tap
-- powering our streetcars, fire stations, the airport and schools.

More than 1 billion *plastic* water *bottles* end up in the California's
trash each year, taking up valuable landfill space, leaking toxic additives,
such as phthalates, into the groundwater and taking 1,000 years to
biodegrade. That means bottled water may be harming our future water supply.

The rapid growth in the bottled water industry means that water extraction
is concentrated in communities where bottling plants are located. This can
have a huge strain on the surrounding eco-system. Near Mount Shasta, the
world's largest food company, Nestle, is proposing to extract billions of
gallons of spring water, which could have devastating impacts on the McCloud
River.

So it is clear that bottled water directly adds to environmental
degradation, global warming and a large amount of unnecessary waste and
litter. All this for a product that is often inferior to San Francisco's tap
water. Luckily, there are better, less expensive alternatives:

-- In the office, use a water dispenser that taps into tap water. The only
difference your company will notice is that you're saving a lot of money.

-- At home and in your car, switch to a stainless steel water bottle and use
it for the rest of your life knowing that you are drinking some of the
nation's best water and making the planet a better place.


*Jared Blumenfeld is the director of the San Francisco Department of the
Environment. Susan Leal is the general manager of the San Francisco Public
Utilities Commission.*

More by Jared Blumenfeld: http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/19/BUGBONL7VI1.DTL

interesting fact:
The leading bottled water brand in the United States is PepsiCo's Aquafina, followed by Coke's Dasani. Each does more than $1 billion in annual sales, according to Beverage Marketing Corp.
Both Aquafina and Dasani, as well as many other bottled-water brands sold in stores and supermarkets, are what the FDA calls purified water. Purified water comes from the same municipal pipes that everyone else's water comes from.
The difference is that purified water undergoes any of a variety of filtration treatments to remove chlorine and most dissolved solids.
"It's municipal-source water that's been purified," explained Hemphill at Beverage Marketing Corp.

In other words, tap water

more info on water bottles...
http://www.consrv.ca.gov/index/news/2003%20News%20Releases/NR2003-13_Water_Bottle_Crisis.htm

-SBH