Bottled water is a joke

It's bad enough that people are so easily hoodwinked into believing that bottled water is somehow inherently superior to tap water (don't they know that much of it actually IS tap water??), but it's doubly bad that the result is millions of empty plastic bottles ending up in the landfills year after year.

Even with snooty spring water bottling plants that claim extreme purity, there's really no watchdogs in place to monitor the process on an ongoing basis. If, one or two days a week, these companies quietly filled their tanks with municipal water straight from the tap, how would anyone know?

In fact, in many cases we'd probably be better off if they did cheat and use tap water, because your local municipal water company is required by law to test water quality weekly and make the results a matter of public record. Bottled water companies are required to do no such thing. (And they don't.)

Then there's plastic outgassing, which leaches yummy phthalates and xenoestrogens into your fancy yuppie water. All plastic outgasses, including baby toys, water bottles, food containers, and the very computer I am typing these words on now. We're surrounded by outgassing plastics at all times, and there's isn't much we can do about a lot of it. But what we can do is reduce our exposure to it as much as possible, and eliminate all contact of our food and drink with plastics.