I used to live in southern NY and had some of the best municipal water and my grandparent’s lived upstate where their water came out of Lake George (the northern end) which is tested several times daily and has the purest water in the state. Those taps I drank out of constantly, without fear.

I don’t trust my water here, even though I have had it tested several times. I do use it, but the majority of the water I drink if from a large bottle (think office cooler) in which I refill bottles constantly and when I am done, I do recycle them. I don’t see what choice I have other than installing a full water purification system.

Good points though. I have had these same concerns for years now.

* Bottled water uses energy and resources to create packaging for something that runs cheaply and cleanly from the faucet in your own home
* Not only is it expensive and energy demanding to make bottles, but then to ship the bottled water costs more money and isn’t eco-friendly
* 96% of bottled water is sold in single-size polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles, which end up in city trash cans rather than recycling bins. The national recycling rate for all PET bottles, including soda bottles, is 23.1 percent
* About 4 billion PET bottles end up in the waste stream, costing cities around 70 million dollars a year in cleanup and landfill costs
* Bottled water costs around as much as a bottle of soda or juice, which obviously requires additional ingredients and processing, yet people pay for it
* Americans buy 28 billion water bottles a year, all that plastic and the energy used for manufacturing and transportation is very hard on the environment
* In addition to this, few bottles are recycled properly or reused but instead placed into the nearest trashcan
* Bottled water costs as much as $10 per gallon compared to less than a penny per gallon for tap waters
* Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil in 2006, enough fuel for more than 1 million United States cars for a year, and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide
* Some cities are considering taxes on bottled water, others are talking about bans on bottled water at city events, and even some restaurants have stopped selling bottled water in efforts to reduce waste
* If you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 dollars annually! The same amount of tap water would cost around 49 cents
* Bottled water often contains more bacteria and impurities than tap water, because the EPA regulates municipal water systems more stringently than the FDA regulates bottled water
* Worldwide, 2.7 million tons of plastic are used each year to make water bottles, and in the United States, less than 20% of these bottles are recycled
* Many things in this world get wasted, fill up our landfills, harming the environment and our health- don’t let bottled water, something so unnecessary and avoidable, be one of them

http://www.tappening.com has up to date statistics, facts, and figures that leads to a seriously simple solution: Stop drinking bottled water. Your tap water with a filter is just as good and basically the same exact water!