It seems to me that bottled water has become extremely popular lately and with incidents like Walkerton, our trust in the safety of tap water has been shattered. I admit it, I am just as guilty, especially since I have been trying to eat well and avoid excessive processed sugars in my diet. Bottled water is very conventient when you are on the run and you want to avoid sugar laden pop or juice, but I have been worrying more lately about the waste of all of those empty water bottles rattling around in our recycling bins.

The main reason that we turn to bottled water is that most people say that they prefer the taste of it over tap water and most people believe that it’s safer. Health Canada states that there is no evidence to support the case that bottled water is safer than tap water. In fact, more than 25% of bottled water brands are really just tap water in a bottle. One of the best selling brands of bottled water, Dasani by Coca-Cola is bottled from Calgary and Brampton tap water. Professor Rolf Halden of Johns Hopkins University says “city water is much more highly regulated and monitored for quality. Bottled water is not. It can legally contain many things we would not tolerate in municipal drinking water.”

Plastic water bottles also often contain chemicals called phthalates that are environmental contaminants and are endocrine distrupters in people and animals. The US NRDC even found one bottle labeled “Spring Water” came from an industrial parking lot next to a hazardous waste site and 1/3 of bottled water contained contamanation often exceeding the safe limits for toxins like arsenic.

So, the real question is, what am I going to do now? I trust my municipal water supply and resent paying 3000 times more for water, so I am going to try to remember to fill a Nalgene bottle when I go out and avoid sending more plastic bottles to recyclers and landfill. Too often we forget about the first two words in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.