Americans spend 16 billion dollars per year on bottled water.

Have you ever noticed how many people you see with a bottle of water in their hand?  Americans spend 16 billion dollars per year on bottled water. We drink more bottled water now than milk, coffee or beer!   If you’ve been around awhile, you can probably remember when bottled water wasn’t readily available. When we wanted a drink, we went to the faucet, turned it on and presto, a glass of water.  Then along came our friends in France. In 1978 they introduced Perrier to the United States and that got the whole trend going. In the first year it was introduced to America, they sold us $20 million worth of their water in bottles.

In many areas of the world, good municipal water is unavailable which makes bottled water a necessity.  In most developed countries however, public water is of high quality and is much cheaper than bottled. The United States has some of the best water available, yet we drink a billion bottles per week and are raising a generation of people who look down their noses at tap water and shy away from drinking fountains which are disappearing from the scene.  Instead, we rush into the convenience store to pay as much as twice the price of gasoline for a drink of water.   Can you hear someone laughing at us in the distance?

Some folks believe that bottled water is healthier than tap water. 

In all actuality, there are few facts to substantiate that bottled water is any safer or cleaner than water from the tap. In fact, it is estimated that 25% of the bottled water we buy is water that has been taken from municipal taps, filtered, and then repackaged in plastic bottles.  There is also concern that bottled water often lacks fluoride ions that are present in most municipal waters and help prevent tooth decay. 

Then there are the environmental issues. 

Annually, we toss 38 billion water bottles into landfills – in excess of one billion dollars worth of plastic.  This plastic in our environment can take between 400 and 1000 years to degrade. By the way, it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil annually to produce those bottles that clog our landfills, oceans and rivers.  Every week we move 1 billion bottles around the country in trains, trucks and ships. That is equivalent to a convoy of 37,000 18-wheelers hauling water in plastic bottles.

The beautiful part about living in this great country is our freedom to make choices. 

I certainly don’t blame the water companies or claim that they are being less than honest.  They are supplying a product for which consumers have created a demand and that’s what makes the economy go around. Myself, I think I’ll stick with the free stuff.  Cheers!