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Bottled water is a scam. It's less regulated than municipal tap water in most developed nations, companies suck up water from small towns and use tons of fuel t
by djsumdog 9y ago
Bottled water is a scam. It's less regulated than municipal tap water in most developed nations, companies suck up water from small towns and use tons of fuel to ship it out of those watersheds and then charge people 1000% markup.
For countries without clean water, the effort should be put into getting municipal water supplies.
Don't buy plastic disposable water bottles if you live in a developed nation. They prop up a terrible industry, generate tons of waste, use tons of oil and it's less clean than just drinking from a water fountain.
Edit: the documentary Tapped is a great film about the bottled water industry, and Blue Gold is a good one about the water industry in general.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lcfcjs 9y agoGo live in Flint, Michigan and report back. Thanks.
- manmal 9y ago> For countries without clean water, the effort should be put into getting municipal water supplies. And until the problem has been fixed, what exactly are they supposed to drink?
- ceejayoz 9y agoI suspect most developing areas without clean water supplies are simultaneously unable to afford buying bottled water. They're often drinking dirty water, which they may or may not treat.
- guelo 9y agoThird world countries I'm familiar with use the big office-type bottles which are reusable and not as wasteful. https://i.stack.imgur.com/TfVHl.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/TfVHl.jpg
- GuB-42 9y agoUsually they have water purifiers. From simple ceramic filters to fancy machines using reverse osmosis and UV treatment. In Thailand for example, they have vending machines dispensing drinking water into your own bottle.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoWe have a lot of them in the US. The usual ones are water machines for the big jugs like at Walmart. However, the companies selling machines that make bags of ice are adding purified water to their machines, too. One can see many styles by typing these words into Google images: ice vending machine bagged list. Including the specific words since I got more nonsense results doing this search than about any other this year. Terms are too overloaded.
- photojosh 9y agoI grew up in a developing country. We boiled all our tap water for drinking.
- awareBrah 9y agowhat do you suggest for people who cannot tolerate the taste of some tap water. The one in my area taste very metallic and makes tea/coffee brewed with it have an unpleasant flavor. I bought a brita-like water filter with great reviews on amazon, but despite that, some of the metallic flavor remains. My old home had a reverse osmosis system which tasted amazing, but I'm not going to invest in a super expensive water system for the apartment I am renting. I just want good tasting water
- mancerayder 9y agoHear, hear. I have a sensitive sense of smell (and thus taste) and tap water here (in a huge metropolitan city in the U.S.) tastes like chlorine, and it's a little sweet. People here say it's "delicious." To avoid drinking "delicious" tap water I drink bottled water, and I have for decades. Also, fluoride in the tap water? No, thank you. I don't get cavities because I eat well and brush correctly.
- therein 9y agoThis is how I feel about tap water as well. In many places I lived, and in my current city people like the tap water and it is supposed to be delicious but it is not. How are people overlooking such obvious notes of chlorine and that little sweetness?
- petre 9y agoReverse ismosis filtered water water. Less expensive in the ling run.
- vatys 9y agoYou can get a reverse osmosis system for ~$150. Maybe not cheap, but not super expensive either. Even if you're renting for a year and leave it behind that's less then $0.50 a day over one year.
- alfanick 9y agoWhich leaves you with classical-clean-US-water - no taste, nothing. Doesn't taste good, doesn't taste bad, it's just not there.
- Retric 9y ago25% of US municipal drinking water fails Safety standards: https://www.popsci.com/drinking-water-standards https://www.popsci.com/drinking-water-standards Those standards are also very loose IMO letting a lot of crap though that I don't want to drink on a regular basis. So, it's really more of a mixed bag than you might think.
- opencl 9y agoIf you live in one of those areas you're far better off with a filtration system than regularly purchasing bottled water which is also not in any way guaranteed to be safe.
- Retric 9y agoIt can take a lot to filter water safely. The classic carbon filter under the sink does very little to improve safety, even reverse osmosis can fall short. So, while you can make things safer it's far more difficult than many assume.
- andai 9y agoSounds like the best option is to buy bottled water, and then filter out the microplastics.
- AstralStorm 9y agoMost problems with plastics are chemical not physical contamination. (It is a solution of plasticizers and substrates in water.) I am pretty sure ingesting plastic sand would be nowhere newer bad without these. (Intestine shouldn't take that in.) These are extra hard to filter out. Even big fermentation tanks and reverse osmosis filters have problems with this.
- haZard_OS 9y agoThere is also the danger of microplastic particles acting as endocrine disruptors. This is a rapidly developing field within (eco)toxicology and is of growing concern among environmental scientists. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.6b01441 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.6b01441 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749117341234?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974911... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969717331613?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
- foobaw 9y agoWhen I visited India, the locals recommended me to always drink bottled water or else I'd get really sick. Maybe in the US, it can be solved on a city-by-city basis. For some other countries, I think it's a much more complex problem.
- petre 9y agoMorocco as well. Be sure to check the seal because they refill them with tap water and sell it on the street. You can get sick even from washing your teeth with tap water. Sick as in ruin your vacation, not sick as in really sick.
- chimeracoder 9y ago> You can get sick even from washing your teeth with tap water. Sick as in ruin your vacation, not sick as in really sick. I mean, I'd call HAV "really sick". Even for people who clear the infection without assistance and no long-term complications, it's rather involved and goes far beyond simply "ruin your vacation".
- petre 9y agoNot HAV but other stuff that's prevalent and they're quite immune to it while westeners are not. Of course you can also get HAV as well if you aren't careful.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 9y agoHow much is it because of reality and how much is because pf propaganda? People on Brazil will always tell you to drink bottled water too, yet all the safety issues that make into news (always a very small note at the end of the news) are with bottled water and the sanitary standards are much more strict with tap water.
- 9y ago
- alfanick 9y agoJust my personal experience: tap water in US tastes bad, bottled watered in US tastes also bad ("purified" water). As European on business trip I was forced to buy San Pellegrino or other imported (and expensive :/) brands. On the plane they also give "purified" water -> distilled water + salt. You go to a restaurant, they insist on infinite refill on that bad tasting water... I'm seriously not surprised with so called "Raw Water" movement in US.
- wollstonecraft 9y agoWhat if you want to avoid fluoride?
- jwilk 9y agoOut of interest, why?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wollstonecraft 9y agoEndocrine disruptor and neurotoxin.
- vim_wannabe 9y agoProbably the same reason why people may want to avoid lead, mercury in tuna or microplastics: Science is always trying to figure out the safe levels of consumption. Especially for something consumed your entire life starting as a fetus.
- dawnerd 9y agoMove to Portland I guess
- temp-dude-87844 9y agoBottled water is a classic example of profiting off of regulatory arbitrage. In well-developed countries, bottled water is easy money: move to a friendly jurisdiction, ship a transportable product out, and sell to a self-selecting, discretionary customer base at obscene markups. It's pure profit. In less-developed countries, bottled water is enabled by and further perpetuates structural inequality: it provides clean water to those who are willing and able pay for it, without the infrastructure and maintenance load of municipal piping, dealing with governments, or having to be exposed to risks that coincide with this inequality, including theft, leaks, and distributed contamination.
- lopmotr 9y agoIt's bad to perpetuate structural inequality within a country but not between countries? Or do you also agree that it's wrong for developed countries to have clean tap water because it gives their citizens an advantage over citizens of poorer countries? Preventing disease is very simply a good thing. How can you possibly say that you want people to be sick just to make life more fair?
- guskel 9y agoSay all you want but tap water just doesn't taste as good. Fix that problem and people won't mind switching.
- flurdy 9y agoThe flavour partially down to several factors. Psychology is one. Many blind tests of tap water filled in bottles has people fooled. Temperature is another. Ice cool water, from office water coolers, or just with ice cubes. Partially again psychology but cool water tastes better, tap or not. Source and water treatment obviously matters the most. In my experience tap water in Norway tastes really nice. It is where I grew up so my taste buds expect water to taste like that so that may be a reason, but I think it is also down to the source of the water and its filtration technology. And it is cold water. I only choose to drink bottled water there when it is more convenient, not for flavour. (Other mountainous, water-rich 1st world countries I have been to also seems to have nice flavoured water). But where I live now, in another flat, full of people country, the tap water is very safe and clean but I do not like the flavour. I still drink it to quench a thirst but prefer bottled when there is a choice. So I guess for large parts of the world the flavour will be decided by where they live. Filters like https://www.brita.com https://www.brita.com probably makes it nicer but at an individual cost and less convenient.
- koolba 9y agoI’ll take NYC tap water against any bottled water worldwide. Sure it’s totally subjective and anecdata, but my sample size is over 100 brands in 20+ countries.
- chimeracoder 9y ago> I’ll take NYC tap water against any bottled water worldwide. Me too, but NYC is a major outlier when it comes to water quality. NYC water was, quite literally, sold as bottled water for a while. Most other places in the country have nowhere near the quality of tap water that NYC has.
- itakedrugs 9y agoI test my bottled water and it has ~4ppm of stuff in it... my well water has ~400ppm of stuff... I would rather drink the purest one... I could buy a reverse osmosis system to purify my water but I would not be saving money. The people in my city that have city water often complain about cloudy water, so it's not any better (maybe worst).
- lopmotr 9y agoHaving a 1000% markup doesn't make it a scam. The raw material is practically free so anything they charge is going to be a huge markup. There's lots of competition and people are willing to buy it. What's wrong with that? You're not paying for the water, but for all the other value that comes along with it. You can carry it around, or store it in your car, or whatever. You don't have to remember to fill up the water bottle whenever you go out because you can just get a new full one anywhere. That takes mental burden off people so they can focus on more important things. You can give one to someone else without worrying about spreading meningitis. You can take a carton of them on a group trip without asking everyone to rinse out and old milk bottle the day before. There's value in making people's lives easier. What's wrong with using tons of oil? It's not being burnt so it doesn't contribute to climate change. Are you concerned that it's wasting the valuable oil that would be better used to power a car or power station?
- haldora 9y ago> What's wrong with using tons of oil? It's not being burnt so it doesn't contribute to climate change. Are you concerned that it's wasting the valuable oil that would be better used to power a car or power station? Instead of having a VLCC bringing crude to a Gulf Coast refinery where a large part is converted into propylene for bottle and cap production, the crude could be kept safely in its original well, unused. If the demand for propylene (et al) is reduced, refiners would alter their production to make less, ultimately lowering their crude intake, ceteris paribus.
- rekado 9y agoOil is a limited resource that can be used for way more important things than disposable water bottles, such as medical supplies (syringes, IV bags, etc) and durable plastics components. Plastics themselves are a great resource that should not be wasted, not least because of the amount of energy and water it takes to produce them. Most plastic bottles are burnt, so they do contribute to climate change; the small percentage of bottles that actually are recycled cannot be turned into new bottles --- plastics are always downcycled; recycled plastics are sometimes mixed in with virgin plastic pellets, but it's usually a relatively small amount of the total. (I'm setting up an educational project for school classes on the topic of plastic recycling and renewable energy.)
- chiefalchemist 9y agoAgree. However, and I'm not trolling, what about Flint MI and a number of other US cities with moderate and ongoing water issues (e.g., Trenton NJ)?