Not only does bottled water contribute to incredible amounts of waste, but it also costs a thousand times more than water from the tap, and there’s a good chance that that’s exactly where it comes from—a municipal water supply. Last year, this popular convenience sent 38 billion empty plastic bottles to America’s landfills. Trains, trucks, and boats guzzle millions of barrels of oil and fossil fuels just in the transportation of bottles all over the world. All the while, bottlers are ringing in the cash while spending millions of dollars a year marketing bottled water as safer as or healthier than water from the faucet. The next time you plunk down a dollar or more for that fancy water bottle, consider the difference in standards between the two.

Bottled Water in the News

Apparently, the only thing pure about Pepsi’s Aquafina brand was the profit. In July, the soft drink giant was forced to add disclaimer labels to their popular bottled water stating that the water comes from a “public source” following legal action from a Boston organization. The group claimed that previous labels, which marketed Aquafina as “pure water,” were intentionally misleading. Similar legal pressure is being placed on Coca-Cola’s Dasani brand.