Our Love for Bottled Water

"Our growing preference for bottled water is hazardous to the planet's health, says a new Earth Policy Institute report.  Americans alone drank 7 billion gallons of the stuff in 2004, and worldwide consumption has more than doubled in just six years. To bottle and ship a year's worth of bottled water to the US, companies such as PepsiCo and Danone burn 1.5 million barrels of oil, enough to fuel 100,000 cars for a year. Almost 90 percent of the plastic bottles end up in landfill, where they can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.  In a  world in which billions lack any access to clean drinking water, this is an absurd extravagance--especially since both taste test and chemical analyses reveal there's usually no difference between tap water and bottled water. . . Bottled water costs 10,000 times more than tap water--and is often more expensive, per gallon, than gasoline." (The Week, 3/3/06)