Bottled Purified Water Makes Me Insane

So another topic a little off the beaten tech path for me but I can't help it.  Water Bottles, I'm a fan of telling it like it is and right now Water Bottles have me thinking . . . 

I'm a fan of water - we all need water to live and I typically carry water with me as I'm afraid someday I'll open the car door and find myself in a desert or possibly floating in space and very thirsty.  I've seen the movies, I know it can happen.

When I read in a recent issue of Time Magazine how much we consume in plastic bottles and some push back from readers ( Melissa Gilespie Sept 5 issue for one ) about how they HAVE to consume their water in a bottle and avoid the tap - this really made me cringe.  I try VERY VERY hard to not purchase water in a bottle and I'm a water snob, I admit it, I like my water pure, I like it chilled, not shaken and I'm fine with no ice.  But it doesn't take much to pick up a water filtering system either on the go, at home or at work.  I use a Brita pitcher filter system at work for over two years now, it's the best $20 I ever spent www.brita.com.  At home I have filters on my sink and frig - when you consider the industry is a $50 - $100 Billion dollar ( yes, that's a B as in Billion ) consumer black hole, I'm not surprised people are so easily misled into buying overpriced bottled water.  So when I go out I prepare and fill a bottle . . . from the filtered tap of the local municipal system of course.

I wasn't aware of this but did you know almost 44% of "purified" bottled water actually comes from municipal water systems?  http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09610.pdf

Mother Nature Network posted a 5 easy to understand piece about why we shouldn't be buying bottled water http://bit.ly/qfKIhQ and it makes a whole lot of sense.

It takes 200 million bottles of water to circle the globe, in 2005 over 28 Billion bottles were sold.  Do the math, this is insanity.

Want to know more? Start with the Sierra Club's fact sheet on bottled water.

Michael Sola is a Technologist who finds solutions and can translate tech into english. He's a blogger, invited presenter and speaker - he also rarely has to show ID to walk into a pub. Follow him at http://twitter.com/michaelsola : his views and comments are his own.