Bottled Water: Maybe You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For
Although bottled water seems to be a reasonably inexpensive choice for people who want quality drinking water, you may not be getting everything you’re paying
Courtesy of http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/10/28/241419373/how-much-water-actually-goes-into-making-a-bottle-of-water
for. In addition to this assumption, purchasing bottled water regularly is actually quite a bit more expensive than if you used a home drinking water system which takes inexpensive tap water and for an affordable price, turns it into safe, pure, great-tasting drinking water without the devastating water footprint that bottled water companies leave behind.
On the outside, bottled water seems to be a great alternative. But when you pay for bottled water, you are actually paying for a lot of water waste that you may not have known about before. As a multi-billion dollar industry, bottled water companies have plenty of fans. But consumers need to know what goes on during the making of bottled water and we hope to help create an awareness about water waste when it comes to making those plastic bottles and the bottled water itself. Likewise, the majority of those plastic water bottles will end up in our landfills as toxic plastic waste which takes over a thousand years to degrade. A recent article from Thomas Andrew Gustafson from NPR recently discussed the true cost of bottled water – beyond just the roughly 50 billion plastic bottles we throw away every year.
Environmentalists have always claimed that the bottled water industry was detrimental to our environment. In response, the International Bottled Water Industry did a study to determine how much water goes into producing a liter of bottled water. While the initial findings showed that it takes 1.39 liters to produce 1 liter, less than beer, soda, wine and hard liquor, there were other components that added to the overall water footprint that is alarming. According to Gustafson, water used in production, packaging and delivery increase the amount of water going into making the bottle could be up to six or seven times what’s inside the bottle.
As the bottled water industry begins to analyze their water footprints to find opportunities for conservation, we encourage you to learn more about our drinking water systems such as a home water purifier which is much more eco-friendly and can turn tap water into clean, safe drinking water by effectively removing harmful contaminants that can occur naturally in our tap water through innovative water filtration technology. Our drinking water systems and water filters are affordable and will reduce water waste and water footprints as well as plastic bottles in our landfills. Reverse osmosis is one way to get what you pay for instead of failing to know the true cost of your bottled water. To read the article from NPR, click here.
