Another one here. I love having a bottle to drink out of it because it’s convenient, but 99.9% of the time I’m just drinking tap water that I filled it with. I buy a new bottle every few months or so for the sake of hygiene.
I drink bottled water because the tapwater around here smells/tastes of chlorine to me. My husband drinks it for the convenience. He can throw 2-3 bottles of water in his lunchbox and re-hydrate wherever he happens to be. Sometimes I refill my bottle of Publix “spring water” from the water-cooler here at work, which is filtered and doesn’t taste of chlorine, and sometimes I just use a sport-bottle that I can put in the dishwasher and refill it 2-3 times a day. I do like the FIJI water bottles, though. They’re pretty and I like the sturdiness of them.
Because we have the best large public water system in the whole damn world. It is a point of city pride that we have the only big city water system in the country (perhaps the world) that doesn’t suck.
Even those who can think of something to bitch about for anything can’t complain about New York City water.
Yeah, remember the huge tunnels in Die Hard 3? Those were water tunnels from upstate.
Of course, what appears in your tap isn’t quite the same, usually, as the pure stuff you can buy in the bottle.
Whether the difference is worth the stupidity of purchasing water in a bottle, only the individual can say. 
Cite? I hear this said but only as a rumour, and call me skeptical but if I were selling bottled water to suckers, it sure as hell would suit me to have them believe they should buy new bottles all the time and not just refill the old ones.
Have you read the linked article? It’s very informative, and confirms all my suspicions. Cop this:
For the most part unless someone can tell me they have done blind taste tests under controlled conditions of the water they say they don’t like, and the water they say they do, I don’t believe they can tell the difference. It’s all just perception.
No. It’s generally much less pure than the tap water, according to most of the tests that have been done.
Here is how I propose to label my new line of “gourmet” watrs! Think it’ll pass muster?
CONTENTS: 100% NATURAL water, from FIJI, blended with other waters of excellent quality, all from completely MATURAL sources-no atificial waters or supplements .100% Natural!
Next, I plan to market ANTARTICA WATER, ALASKA WATER, etc.!
Here is a recent article from the New York Times on the dangers of refilling water bottles.
Summary: As the bottle gets more crinkly, antimony can leach from the bottle (but because the manufacturers won’t say what’s in the plastic, we don’t know what else might be leaching). Also, because it’s not easy to clean a commercial water bottle, it can harbor bacteria as it’s reused, although phthalates are not a problem. And Nalgene bottles might leach bisphenol A.
Perhaps this topic deserves its own thread. However, the article you link to quotes one Frederick S. vom Saal, a professor of biology at the University of Missouri on the subject of whether degradation of PET bottles through re-use leads to leaching of antimony. A quick google suggest vom Saal has never actually done a study: there is no reference on the entire internet that I can find suggesting to the contrary. Vom Saal’s only studied contribution to the field seems to be regarding leaching of bisphenol A from Nalgene bottles, which (ironically) are specifically sold as re-usable, while PET bottles aren’t.
While this apparently off the cuff comment of vom Saal’s (via the NYT) is picked up and treated like gospel all over the internet, there is nothing of more substance that I can find on the topic of whether weathering of PET bottles causes increased antimony leaching from them.
Further, a conclusion that does seem to be supported by research by one Shotyk is that antimony levels in water in a PET bottle increase with storage time (to levels very substantially less than mandated, by the way).
So the only substantial research suggests that if you buy Fiji water that was bottled in Fiji, trucked to a port, sat around in a shipping container for a ship to arrive, shipped, warehoused, trucked, put on shelves and eventually bought and drunk from a pristine “new” bottle (what, two months later?) you will cop more antimony than me if I fill an old PET bottle in the morning and drink it that day.
Been to Fiji. Viti Levu, in fact.
Fiji water was what they put in our rooms (so that we could buy it) as the ‘clean’ water. I thought it was cute that even Fiji had it’s own bottled water fake tourist crap.
The water that I SAW in Fiji? Ocean: beautiful. River: shudder. Which one did I get to drink in a nice ceremony with the village women before they let us buy pottery from them? River water! Mixed with dried, powdered wacky-root! (But not too much of the wacky-root, because we were only tourists, and they were just doing this so we would buy things. Save most of the wacky-root for family.)
I thought it was cute that there was Fiji waster at the Airport, I bought a bottle as a souvenir. A month later it was in supermarkets everywhere!
When I think of Fiji and water, I do not think of clear, crystalline pure water. I think of drinking the muddy water from the creek that we crossed on a log to get to the village. The creek with the cow lying next to it and the chickens pecking around. And then mixing that water with something unknown that tasted like mud (funny, huh?) singing a song, singing for each person when it was their turn to drink, participating and singing my part and drinking when it was my turn (because you have to be respectful of other people’s cultures, even if you get giardia and die, right?), and then driving back later that day trying not to think about muddy water.
So that’s Fiji and water. Brown. Muddy. Mysterious brown powder. Tastes like mud. Mysterious and unknown intestinal passengers.
Have I made you feel as nauseated as I am right now? Then it’s worth it and you don’t have to buy Fiji water anymore. ::shudder::
I think the whole point of bottled water is for people who want that experience of drinking a bottled beverage, but think soda and everything else isn’t healthy.
Anyway, I think there can be a lot of difference in the taste of water. The problem is I just don’t think most bottled waters captures that, consistently. For example I now have a bottle of poland spring and a glass of filtered nyc tap. The poland spring seems to suck all the saliva from my mouth and tastes bad. It’s too pure. The filtered tap has a tang and is much more refreshing.
Cite? My taste buds. Have you ever tasted earthquake water after about six months?
Granted, that may be a different kind of plastic, and that water isn’t refilled. It also probably matters if it’s left in the sun. So I don’t know for sure; I was just trying to say why one might buy a new bottle every so often.
So your cite for the suggestion that you would want to change bottle every now and again rather than keep refilling the same one is that if you do something entirely different, then the water tastes bad.
Gotcha.
Princhester, a man possesses the character to disclose the limits of his own argument and you have nothing to say but to throw it back in his face.
I’m not “suggesting” that people should change bottle “every now and again.” I’m simply saying that I can UNDERSTAND why they might want to do that. I refill mine until it shows sign of mold. Do you continue even after signs of mold? If so, enjoy your mold.
I’d stop while I were behind if I were you. Your original post said “things in the plastic can leech into the water”. Now you’re talking about renewing when the bottle gets mouldy.