We have plenty of thoughts on bottled water, but usually we’re talking about the water. And there is a solid case against the water in bottled water.
The big beverage companies rarely see a situation that doesn’t require sodium so we can skip the sodium just by avoiding a few of the biggest brands. Aquafina and Dasani represent almost 25% of the water market. Both are merely purified municipal water.
Moreover, the requirements for bottling of water are astonishingly low. The FDA regulates bottled water. So whereas your municipal water is monitored under EPA guidelines of testing multiple times per day, the bottling facility is monitored weekly. And we already know that municipal water itself requires no reduction in total dissolved solids and is packed with chlorine for the ride to your tap.
But then that water is added to a bottle. We consume billions of tons of plastics per year. In 2008, we celebrated our first year since their introduction where we had an actual decline in the consumption of plastic bottles and jars. Every square mile of ocean has 46,000 pieces of floating plastic in it. (UN, 2006)
According to the Pacific Institute, we used 17 million barrels of energy just producing the bottles for bottled water in 2007. That’s enough fuel to power 1.3 million cars for a year. Or, better, fuel every car in Wisconsin for 3 months.
This doesn’t even address the fuel consumed transporting water for sale in bottles.
The average American consumed over 160 bottles of water in 2007. And recycled less than 40 of them. We can do better than this. Well, we couldn’t do much worse.
One set of filters for the Kinetico K5 will fill 4,000 500ml bottles. You’re talking about 2 pennies per bottle from a system that has the absolute best certifications on the market.
Here, these are the specifications for the system: https://www.h2odoctors.com//media/K5_drinkingsystem_datasheet.pdf
Oh…and it tastes great too.
