7 Shocking Things You Never Knew about Bottled Water

bottled water

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Bottled water is healthy! Or so some people would want us to believe. Seriously, those pictures on the bottles, the ones showing beautiful mountain streams, or waterfalls, are not reality. They are simply pictures or drawings designed to entice your mind into thinking that what is depicted on the label is exactly what is inside. Bottled water is nothing more than water. It’s big business, too. If it wasn’t, why are there all those different brands of water for sale? No one would spend money bottling and shipping water if it didn’t make them a generous profit. You should know, however, that bottled water is wasteful, not more healthy than regular old water from your kitchen sink, and  distracts from the true needs of good health. Here are 7 good reasons you should stop buying bottled water.

 

1. Plastic bottles are not ecological

Most likely you have heard through mainstream media that it’s ok to drink from plastic bottles since they are recyclable. They are not being honest with you. First, plastic bottles are not biodegradable, not in any meaningful way. They will be around for thousands of years, even if we stopped producing them today.

What most people don’t know, or don’t think about, it what it takes to produce one of those water bottles. Vast quantities of fossil fuels, and water, are used to manufacture, fill, and then ship those bottles around the world. You don’t believe that’s true? Have you looked at the water bottles sold in the 99 cent stores? Most are from China or Thailand. Think of the fossil fuels, gas, oil, etc., that it took just to ship those bottles here? Why are we doing that anyway? Is the United States fresh out of plastic bottles and water? Read more what’s in your water.

 

2. Bottled water is not cheap

That pretty picture of a mountain stream on that bottle in your hand does not mean this is where your water came from. A few brands do come from some underground water source, but most bottled water is nothing more than slightly filtered municipal water.

Some companies try to dress it up by filtering or radiating the water with ultraviolet light before selling it to you at thousands times the actual cost of that water. For example, a 20 ounce bottle of water costs about one dollar. That is 5 cents an ounce. That sounds really inexpensive until you consider that tap water, which is what bottled water is more or less, is approximately 5 cents a gallon! Also, studies have proved that bottled water can contain mold, benzene, even arsenic. In short, the mark up on bottled water is extreme and their health standards are iffy at best.

 

3. Plastic bottled water means an incredible amount of trash

About 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year! It’s almost inconvieveable. Even with the best recycling efforts, only about 20 per cent of plastic water bottles make it to a recycling plant, with about 80 per cent of plastic water bottles going to a land fill.  Now that’s IF they make it to the trash can at all.

There is so much plastic waste that gigantic pools of plastic trash are virtual floating islands in the world’s oceans. This is a great threat to birds and fish, who get caught in it and drown or get poisoned by it after ingesting it because they thought it was food.

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