Bottled Water: A boon or a bane?

For many years now, bottled water has been growing in popularity. People seem to favor the taste and convenience that this product can offer. It is water that is purified, is made safe to drink, is put into glass or plastic containers and is sealed. Bottled water seems like a silly product to consider using thanks to the reliability and safety of tap water around the world, but there are still many locations that need this product for basic life essentials. It is also very common to use a bottle of water as a way to stay hydrated while working, participating in athletics, going to the gym and other physical activities of life. One of the reasons why it is such a common product is that it is highly affordable. For about 50% of the cost of a soda, juice product or tea, you can purchase a zero-calorie option that can leave you feeling afresh. It has been a good choice of beverage for hydration and many other health purposes. But while water is undeniably great for you, what about other factors such as the whole bottle part?
Bottled water offers you the option to drink water anywhere. It is highly portable, durable and can be sealed. These reasons make it ideal for working out, travelling or doing virtually any activity where you may need to drink water. Bottled water is very convenient to transport or carry, especially in places where drinkable water is not guaranteed, hard to find,found at a great distance or not available at all. This is certainly one of the top benefits of bottled water, where you can just purchase it anytime and anywhere conveniently. Convenience is definitely its main selling point. Due to the fact that it does not expire and can easily be stored, bottled water is ideal for emergency and disaster situations. It is really always a good idea to keep some of this product stored in safe place at home just in case. Most of us would agree that bottled water taste exponentially better than tap water. This is because of the purification process that it goes through before it is made available for drinking, unlike tap water. Production of bottled water is strictly regulated and monitored to make sure that it is clean and free of contaminants. This puts the product highly in demand because clean and safe tap water is not always available. After a natural disaster, water lines might be disrupted, leading to contamination of water supplied to households. In situation like this, bottled water can be life- savers because it is clean and safe to drink. Bottled water is safe to drink due to the test for all sorts of chemicals and bacteria it would undergo before being bottled. For tap water, it can easily become contaminated, leading to severe illness especially in developing countries. Bottled water is readily available in supermarkets and grocery stores and comes in various sizes and content per bottle, giving consumers more choices depending on their needs.
However the cost of purifying, bottling, advertising, transporting and storing bottled water can trickle down to the cost of water itself. This means the product is significantly more expensive than the tap water. Buying bottled water is even more expensive if you are doing it very often. The cost will still depend on its size and brand. Remember that its price usually covers packaging, advertising, shipping and administrative operations. Experts even revealed that it is more costly than milk. Though you are drinking bottled water with a water-filtering system, you can still save more money in the end by filling your own water bottles if you like to drink bottled water every day. Mostly bottled water product contains chemicals such as biphenyl-A (BPA) in the plastic container. This compound can seep into the water which means you are most probably consuming them. This risk is greatly increased if the content is stored in hot areas like those where direct sunlight is present. Truth is- many bottled water products are just filtered tap water. This has been a troubling fact for many of us, but it has been proven time and again. The same is reported in media recently in Manipur in which a product of bottled water (Silver Dew of Loktak Industry) found contaminated substances. Most bottled water is produced by the same factories that are making soft drinks, using the same water. Considering that you may not even be getting better quality water when you buy bottled water, it can be a plain common sense to fill your own instead. You just need clean water and a good water bottle. Government supposedly adds fluoride to tap water to help protect our teeth from decay and other dental problems. On the other hand bottled water is produced without the substance. Production of bottled water increases the use of fossil fuels. With this in mind, you will be avoiding this by filling your own water bottles. Also the manufacture of the plastic for the bottle actually utilizes more water than it takes to fill your own bottle. It poses many unfavorable environmental hazards. The problem can start when empty bottles are not properly disposed, which contributes greatly to the whole pollution problem. Huge percentage of bottles are ending up in trash cans and land fillings, having harmful effects on the environment.
According to a report, Americans buy more than 30 billion liters of water per year, most of which are contained in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. This means nearly 9000,000 tons of plastics which also take 17 million barrels of oil to produce what’s worse; it is found that only 20% of these bottles make it to the recycling bin. The bottled water trend might be doing more for good health, but it is affecting the environment negatively big time. In fact, bottled water certainly has its place in today’s society. Bottled water is an effective way to stay hydrated throughout the day. The overall availability of this product makes it easy to get something that should be healthy to drink whenever and wherever you happen to be. The only problem is that you’re paying hundreds if not thousands of extra money each year to take the advantage of this convenience. When you purchase this item, most of your cost goes to plastic manufacturing instead of the liquid you consumed. Testing from NRDC found that 30% of bottled water samples showed sign of contamination. That means, it may not be safer than some tap water options that are available around the world. The best solution is to purchase a filtering product or even a reverse osmosis system that you can use at home with your current water supply. Then you can invest in reusable water bottles that will help you to stay hydrated at a fraction of the cost of the individual bottles you might be purchasing thereby reducing environmental problem too.And people should start lessening their dependency on it and again become accustomed to the taste and simplicity of tap water.
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