MUCH of the bottled water sold IS tap water. It is municipal water system water that bottlers run through additional treatment such as charcoal, UV and reverse osmosis filtering which removes most remaining solids, metals, pesticides, chlorines, bacteria and viruses.

The Natural Resources Defense Council reported recently that about 30% of bottled water sold is drawn from municipal water supplies.

Aquafina, a huge player in the U.S. market, for instance, uses municipal tap water that is filtered. (And then put in plastic bottles and marked up several thousand percent and sold everywhere.)

The better carbon-block sink (and undersink) filters are equally effective at removing bad taste, impurities and hazards from municipally treated water… The municipal treatment itself is government certified to remove a litany of hazards — but usually adds at least one: chlorine, which is pesticide-like in the body and which tastes and smells awful and which can mix with other chemcials and create a new toxic brew.

The real issues here are twofold:

1. The plastic bottling.

a. Plastics are a petroleum-based product, deplete natural resources and generate pollution in their manufacture.

b. Plastics endanger your health because they leach toxic and hazardous compounds into the food and liquids they store. And

c. Plastics do not biodegrade naturally, are not widely recycled (despite the hype), and are responsible for much of the bulk in landfills and endanger sealife when dumped in the oceans (one way municipalities get rid of their waste).

2. The exotic spring waters that are imported cause immense amounts of carbon release into the atmosphere from bottle manufacture and transport.

ALSO, thanks for the heads-up about the comment-posting problem. THINK it’s fixed. Apparently the subscribe-to-comments plug-in was imcompatible with the latest version of Wordpress that I upgraded to recently. Just installed an upgraded version of the plug-in and from here it seems to be working. (Hope it really is.)

Please ALWAYS let me know if you encounter any problems on this site.