All Bottled Up

Okay, I gotta ask - just between you and me - are you on the bottle? Bottled water, that is. Some people just prefer the taste of bottled water better than tap water, with good reason: the chlorine in tap water, which keeps us from getting fun diseases like cholera and typhoid, tastes like - well, like chlorine. Others avoid tap water because the very same chlorine that is added to our public water supplies to disinfect it, has also been blamed for human health problems. Either way it's a bummer, since we know we should drink eight or more glasses of water a day. So it's no wonder that some folks have resorted to buying designer water by the ounce instead of the practically-free drinking water delivered to our taps every day.

Oh yes, bottled water *is* incredibly expensive relative to tap water. Plus, the plastic bottles in which the water is sold, are a troublesome source of pollution. Not only do the plastic, nonbiodegradable bottles clog the landfills, but the factories that produce the plastic have been blamed as significant sources of water pollution. Are there other options? Sort of. You could let your water sit in an open container in the fridge for a day or so, letting the chlorine dissipate, or you could buy drinking water in bulk containers, or buy water in glass bottles.

Here's another issue. What about all the different types of bottle drinking water for sale? Is there really any difference, in terms of health, among spring water, mineral water, and distilled water? Spring water is sometimes bottled from special sources (the springs, of course!), but it might just be your basic city tap water with the chlorine taken out. I remember in Alaska one company that cheerfully sold bottled "glacier water" - a real hoot, since a: glacier water is nasty, silty, gray stuff, not at all appetizing, and b: the water came from Anchorage's city wells. The company just dechlorinated it. In a sense they were right, though - glacier melt fed the streams, the streams fed the underground aquifers, and it all formed one big happy hydrologic cycle. Does it really matter, if it makes the water taste better?

Some folks like mineral water because it has all those minerals in it, like calcium and iron. Interestingly, the US EPA sets a limit on the amount of total dissolved solids (which include the aforementioned minerals) that can legally be in a public water supply and bottled mineral water is either on the high end of that limit, or sometimes way, way over (varies according to brand). What does that mean? Means it`s illegal to send through the pipes without removing the minerals, but it is perfectly okay to sell in little plastic nonbiodegradable bottles that fill up our landfills and keep those plastics manufacturers spewing chemicals into the Mississippi River. Go figure.

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