Evaluation of Bottled Water Versus Tap Water

The discussion tap water vs. bottled water has very strong opinionated sides. One side believes that tap water is the better choice and is better for the environment and health of the general populace, while the other side of the populace argues that bottled water is the better option. Both sides have an opinion and each side has facts, I am going to go uncover some of the facts and present them to you in a very unbiased informative way.

The facts and opinions about tap water seem to have very valid points regarding the environment and the effects of your health. Did you know that one hundred billion dollars is spent every year on bottled water? Not only does bottled water itself add to unnecessary waste it also adds the excessive waste of money in your wallet, it’ll cost you about a thousand times more to buy bottled water than drink tap water. Buying a sixteen ounce bottle of water for about a dollar would equal to about seven to eight dollars a gallon, where as if you were to drink tap water at home it wouldn’t cost as much probably more or so less than ten cents, But if you were to drink a bottle of water every single day of the year it would equate to about $365 dollars, which is ridiculous to think about when it comes to buying water. You could just buy a filter for your faucet at home if you wanted the taste of bottled water for only about a one-time purchase of $40 dollars. Tap water always has a different taste depending on the region your from because of where the water filter is built on, like in Austin where the whole city is built on limestone so you could partially get a taste of limestone. Tap water can hold it’s own in a taste from the described experiments happening in such places as New York, Boston and California. When asking people to drink three unidentified water samples and asking for which one of these taste good to them many people selected tap water, as a surprise because not many people would think that tap water would taste similar to bottled water.

The safety concerns about tap water are up to EPA standards, but the fears about tap water are perfectly reasonable. Only about 10% of all tap water in the United states don’t meet up to the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which sets the regulatory amounts of containments provided by the public water systems in your area. The standards for tap water and bottled water are the exact same except for the fact that tap water is subject to reporting standards and also whoever is reporting it has to detail where the water is being obtained from of course. Bottled water also doesn’t have to disclaim or announce where their water is coming from. The scary thing about bottled water compared to tap water is that even if the bottled water plants fail to meet federal safety standards they could still sell the water and nobody would notice a thing until they have to label the bottle “contains excessive bacteria”. In 1999, the National defense council tested 1000 bottles of water from 103 different brands and found that about a third of them, at least one sample was over the allowable limits for synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and waste. In 2008 Guidelines for Drinking-Water Quality, “Some microorganisms that are normally of little or no public health significance may grow to higher levels in bottled water.” Tap water compared to bottled water to an environmental standpoint indicates that tap water can get areas with water scarcity. Bottled waters bottles themselves are made from a type of plastic called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. It releases many chemicals in air including nickel, ethyl benzene, ethylene oxide, and benzene. According to a study in 2007 just producing the bottles by themselves cost about 17 million barrels of oil. Fossil fuels used to create bottles also create greenhouse gases. Only 31% of bottles are recycled completely and the rest are left in landfills or get burned releasing all those deadly chemicals again. Tap water has stated some facts and they’re very scary and eye opening when compared to bottled water, but now bottled water has a turn to state some facts and defend itself and show why its on equal standing with tap water.

Bottled water as a whole is more convenient to the people. You can have one at the gym, you can have one at work, you can have on at the playground, and you can have one anywhere! The health concerns about bottled water are contrary to the things you might hear! Many bottled water plants use public water sources! Except when they arrive at bottling plants they have several processes that need to be fulfilled. The process includes reverse osmosis, distillation, micro-filtration, carbon filtration, ozonation, and ultraviolet lights, then placed in a bottle under sanitary conditions and sold to the consumers! So it’s perfectly safe to drink so don’t worry about that! There are differences between tap water and bottled water; Public water systems provide quality water for human consumption and other uses! Public water systems are granted exclusive rights to provide water to areas within its range so people don’t really have control over that! Bottled water is a packaged food sold in individual, clean, sealed containers. With bottled water you have many choices to choose from and many sizes to choose from and there are many factors that go into choosing a water bottle brand that you want to drink such as taste, quality and convenience. There have been many improvements in the composition and makeup of a bottle of water. Bottling companies have started using less PET plastic to make single serve water bottles! They’ve also lessened the weight of the bottles of plastic, which means that there have been a savings of 3.3 billion pounds of PET resin since 2000. Bottling plants have now started to make use of the recycle PET to make bottled water containers. Which means that less energy is used to make the bottles, which require less fossil fuel to burn and which also equals less greenhouse gases! Now bottles are now completely 100% recyclable and is also to be recycled multiple times so that’s a progressive step in the right way!

Bottled water is also very convenient when a natural disaster happens because when a natural disaster happens in an area the tap water and natural water might be contaminated and now undrinkable. Bottled water is very useful in many retrospect’s it can be delivered to countries in need of help from a disaster or just plain poverty. Bottled water is trying to be better for the world but it’s a very slow and progressive process but it’s working slowly. Bottled water has some nasty information about it when compared to tap water though unfortunately. Even, though companies are trying to make bottles recyclable usually only 1 out of every 5 get completely recycled. That’s a step in the right way but there are so many more steps to go. Bottled water also uses 17 million barrels of oil a year just to produce bottles and apparently that much oil is enough to supply a year’s worth of gas for one million cars. The bottled water company also is a huge industry compared to tap water. The bottled water industry is worth about 63 billion and that’s just insane considering tap water cost $.015 cents to the gallon.

So in the matter of Bottled water vs. Tap water, I’m slightly biased towards tap water because of the benefits it has on the Earth and the wallet, but unfortunately I’ll still drink bottled water because its extremely convenient and I believe it taste better. I know this is supposed to be an informative essay but that’s honestly how I feel about the water industry. That shouldn’t affect the decisions other people make on their water choices though. I’ve covered some of the facts and opinions of both the tap water industry and the bottled water industry and it really just comes down to a matter of opinion or a personal preference when it comes to which one you like and want. I’m pretty sure we could all agree that water is amazing though and hopefully in the future find an extremely cheaper way to find the perfect water source that meets all of our standards with the taste, cost and convenience. Until then I’m going to sit here on a limb and say that water in general is really important to our survival and should be nice to the environment because we only have one Earth. So, let’s just all agree water is amazing.