This is the big one for me. When I’m on a road trip and want something to drink or I’m heading home from practice and a little dehydrated its nice to stop by a gas station and get a liter of ice cold water. I drink tap water at home and we have watered delivered at the office but there are a lot of times I’m at neither and don’t want a coke.
I use a Brita pitcher/water filter and a stainless steel water bottle at home and at work I have another ss water bottle and fill it from the filtered water in the company’s refrigerator. I buy a six-pack of bottled water in sports bottles about every two weeks to use when I go to the gym, and I reuse each bottle about three times before I discard it.
Really. Is bottled water way worse than the other options? I’m fine with tap water, but I’m not always in a position to carry around my personal refillable bottle, and I haven’t seen a water fountain in ages (and even then you can’t exactly take one in a car, or into a movie. Actually now that I’m typing I remember a radio program about a new secondary school being built without water fountains because it was felt no one used them anymore). It’s not some sort of snobbish thing, it’s just convenience.
Sometimes I spend lond periods of time at places where potable water is in short supply. The beach comes to mind. Bottled water makes perfect sense in cases like that.
When I was growing up in Chicago, it was a widely held belief that our Lake Michigan water was some of the best municipal tap water on the planet.
Was that your experience all across the city, or did you just try a taste from one building’s old and funky plumbing?
Just wondering as San Francisco’s water from Hetch Hetchy is another of those “best on the planet” waters, but every single downtown office building I’ve ever been in has absolutely horrible tasting water.
Tap water, any place there’s a US municipal water system that’s potable. In Mexico, bottled water, unless I know for a fact the the cistern has been disinfected (and even then, if other people are around, I’ll drink the bottled stuff).
I don’t know how it used to be, but LA has very good quality tap water now. The Metro Water District of SoCal was rated the best municipal water in the US last year.
While I use tap water for almost everything, I still drink Arrowhead spring water (which is locally bottled, too) when I want straight water. I did a blind taste test (at both room temperature and chilled) and I could definitely distinguish the spring water from tap by taste.
I buy it when I’m out and about, and keep a supply of smaller bottles in the truck for the Celtling’s use.
As the Buddha said: What gives a clay cup it;s worth, is the empty space its walls create.
It’;s not the water, it’s the fact that it’s in a convenient container, and cold and clean and available whereever I happen to be when I get thirsty. And soda just doesn’t cut it for me when I’m thirsty.
I drink bottled water,only because it is donated to my work place from the Ice Mountain.The water they use to bottle their water is taken from springs at my work.
The water here in Tucson is nasty. I try not to drink much bottled water- instead, I refill gallon jugs from those water machines outside convenience stores. It’s “filtered by reverse osmosis” or some such thing. It’s 25 cents a gallon, and doesn’t seem as wasteful to me as buying all new gallons out of the store. Tastes much better than tap water, anyway.
So what’s wrong with buying a Brita or Pur filter again?
Some of the people here are clearly dealing with gross tap water. I’d be interested to see a blind comparison of tap water and bottled water for people who prefer bottled water because of the taste, though.
I only buy bottled water when I need the bottle, when there’s no access to tap water, or when I’m visiting a location where the tap water is gross.
I don’t have one because it kind of just seems like a pain in the ass. The initial outlay (me shopping: 25 cents or 60 dollars? hmmm), and you have to keep track of when you changed the filter (more expense) and change them every few months.
$60? That must be the fancy kind that pours the water into a glass for you. Mine was about $25, doesn’t serve the water to me itself, but is still a fairly simple device to use.
If I can find one for $25 I might try it. But I don’t know if I’d trust something so cheap with Tucson water- it’s bad. Really bad. But I’ll look around.
We have a water filter for our tap and do buy bottled water, but it’s the flavored kind, Fruit[sub]2[/sub]0, Propel, that sort of thing. SuperTarget used to sell a ginger-peach flavored water under their Archer Farms brands, but they don’t make it anymore.
The bottled water you refer to is just some kind of dechlorinated mains water, right? (because American seem always to refer to bottled water not mineral water). I don’t see much point in it except for convenience.
OTOH mineral water does have a point. I am glad my supermarket offers about 50 brands; occasionally I get a crate of some other kind to test (I prefer carbonated mineral water in glass bottles myself, preferably from in-state and without too much sodium). The tastes are really discernably different.
The article referenced in the OP complains about PET bottles being wasteful and 86 % not being recycled - why, just use glass bottles and/or scheme with a sufficiently high deposit.
I absolutely love my **Brita pitcher **filter. The tap water here tastes funky (might have something to do with my apartment building being built in the 20s and undoubtedly lead pipes everywhere) so I used to get buy bottled water, but it was getting expensive and not good for cooking with unless you buy those big jugs.
The Brita filters last quite a while (~2 months) and they’re a cinch to replace. My pitcher has an electronic gauge on top that tells you when to change it. Surprisingly, it makes my water taste totally different and quite good. It removes all the funkiness. And I’m using one of their inexpensive models (it’s at Amazon for $27). It’s easily the best purchase I’ve probably made in a while in terms of savings. I haven’t bought bottled water for home use in years.
tap water here, but my parents use bottled. They’ve got iron in their water and it reacts with the tannins in tea, resulting in a foul black substance.
The taste - as others have said. Often the tap water is… nasty. I grew up in a house where we had well water, that was extremely hard, and went through a water softener. I couldn’t believe that anyone would voluntarily drink that (and we never did - at most, we made ice cubes from it, and added those to our soda / iced tea). If bottled water had been an option then, you betcha I’d drink it.
When we were last at Walt Disney World, we could refill our bottles any time from the fountains. We never did so. The water may have been safe to drink but it was FOUL-tasting, the worst I’ve ever had.
Our tap water here (northern VA) is nothing to write home about, taste-wise. I can drink it… if I have to. For quite a while we bought bottled water - then we realized that this led to a tremendous amount of waste, bottle-wise, and bought a Brita pitcher. That’s just enough to turn the water from bleh to drinkable. It’s still not as good as a decent-quality bottled water (even filtered-tap-water Dasani), but it’s acceptable.
Oh, and though Dasani and the like may well be from municipal supplies, they’re certainly from better-tasting supplies. I strongly doubt they come from the Orlando-area watter supply, for example.