My roomate is totally shocked by the fact that I would have the nerve to drink something as unpure as tap water. To him, the downstater, it just seems so unsophisticated to be drinking that stuff out of the faucet. Not to mention, the water might be contaminated. That is farther from the truth. The water you get from the faucet at least in our cities is tested for pathogens regularly, and is purified with chlorine or increasingly non-chlorine substitute. Water from a bottling company may not be as vigorously regulated.

Not only that but most water comes in HDPE plastic bottles. While they are widely recycled, it is a lightweight plastic that leaves something to be desired when it comes to sanitation. You simply can not get plastic clean before pouring water in it, and plastic sometimes leaks bacteria through it. This is one of the big reasons besides sanitation that they pasturize milk at stores, and why it often goes bad before we can drink it. Anybody who's ever had their own dairy cow or goat for their own use, would never think of storing milk as it would spoil rapidly despite being kept cold. Anything stored in plastic is essentially loaded with bacteria. Disgusting.

Regardless of the sanitation matters, some people simply do not like the taste of city water. Living out in the country, stuck with water that often has a lot nasty tasting minerals like iron or sulfur that the water conditioner doesn't take out, city water doesn't seem that bad. Having had city water after going through one of those after market filters, it seems to remove nearly all the taste. The so-called spring water often is just city water that has had some industrial size filters applied to remove chlorine. Drink Aquafresh water or Pepsi? Your probably drinking Colonie town water.

I guess people have the right to put their money where they want. I always think though for the amount of money one can spend a bottle of water, how much water could be provided through a municipal water system or pumped with a muck pump on a farm. The later would be several hundred gallons, the prior several dozen gallons. Even including the added cost of testing water if you're pumping your own from a creek in the Back 40 and the cost of filtering for taste, it doesn't add up.

Not only are the economics bad for you, but it's also bad for the environment. All that plastic has to go somewhere, be it in the municipal garbage pile almost outside city limits we like to call a landfill, or in a burn barrel where it becomes choking black smoke. Some bottles are fortunate enough to be recycled, but those won't last more then one life cycle as a somewhat less useful product like a plastic lumber. As I've noted before, the only effective way of recycling plastic is to burn it, though you have to worry about the dangers of dioxin and stabilizer chemicals being released in the environment.

Bottled waters make me sense if your planning to go outside and you need a quick bottle of water. HDPE is generally recyclable in most places around here, if you make the effort to toss it in a recycle bin, and it's not that toxic to burn. While some health officials warn against refilling HDPE bottles as once the water is exposed to air there is a lot more bacteria to grow in it, the reality is most people aren't going to get sick from it. I have refilled water bottles many times, and at worst the taste is not particularly nice. An alternative would be those Nalgene bottles that use a harder plastic

Forty years if you told somebody you were going to become rich by selling water, they would think you were crazy. Thirty years ago, they would tell you that you had no hope for government cleaning up our streams. The clean water act worked, and for the most part most water supplies are safe to drink from, particularly those that are regulated and treated. There are many reasons not to buy to bottled water, and instead support municipal and local water sources.