keeping it all bottled up

See also : Rome.

There are surely other cities like it but Rome has water fountains scattered throughout the city which people use for drinking and filling up their [insert vessel here] all the day long.

Especially nice on days when it's 41 degrees Celcius.

Part of the problem for me is that my Culligan water-cooler tastes better than the water I drink. That and I am one of those whose body doesn't enjoy changing water that much so when I travel, I get sick. That being said, your arguments are valid and most bottled water isn't that good for you. More than one study today says that bottled water is actually allowing some atrophy to develop in part of our immune systems which some feel is to explain for the increase in colds and flus. Still, I don't like the taste of my tap water even with the water filter attached.

There's the other convenient bit about bottled water coming with a cooler. Mine, for example, is chilled, but has a hot spigot for tea in two seconds. And yes, I know, somwhere in the back of my mind, that it only takes a couple minutes to boil water in a kettle for tea (microwaved tea is too gross for me), but somehow that knowledge never manages to poke its head out when I'm AT the cooler.

And yet, even knowing that, and even knowing that I'm helping in some way to perpetuate the concept of water as a commodity and not a RIGHT, I still drink it.

Le sigh.

I know exactly what you mean, Anil. Since moving to New York 2 months ago, I have been absolutely appalled by the level of waste and difficulty in recycling it. I've tried to keep refilling my water bottles from my Brita pitcher at home and refrain from impulse beverage buys, but it's just so darn more convenient to buy a bottle of water when I'm away from home out on the street somewhere.

Refilling a plastic water bottle has its own issues, too. If you want to refill something, try something that's got more insulation to it that you can also wash.

Pick and industry...???? Any industry...???? They're all a scam!
Water, oil, tires, meds, wheelchairs, paper-clips, computers, paper, sunday school, clothing....Pick one. I don't care where you look, once you scrape away the thin film of bullshit covering the brochure, it's an all for money scam. Always has been, always will be. Welcome to the human condition.

Actually, I think there are responsible, well-intentioned industries, and I don't think that selling convenience in water is a problem. It's a valid opportunity, and someone *should* offer to fill it for people. It just ought to be done to at least the same standards that we expect from our tap at home.

Gotta love that Sunday School scam.

I'm thrilled to live in NYC, home of the best-tasting tap water I've ever run across. (And Anil's right: coming from a spring is no guarantee of quality or even taste...I've tasted mineral waters straight from the spring that made me gag.)

Its not the water thats so nice, its the bottles. And they save dishwater .

Ha! I knew it was a scam! And I'll have ammunition to help deal with all my friends who look at me funny when I order plain old tap water in restaurants.

I don't see the convenience in a product that until recently was (and still is) so efficiently delivered to multiple locations in every houshold on demand by the simple forces of gravity. The distribution costs alone of delivering water in containers is absurd. Think of the thousands of trucks, the amount of gasoline they burn and the pollution they subsequently create, the traffic snarls, the packaging, the shelf space, refrigeration, manpower, etc.

All the negative health and monetary consequences aside, bottled water isn't convenient for any of us.

In the UK at least one water company is running a campaign to convince people to drink tap water instead of the bottled stuff. Also, over here water isn't fluoridated(?) because its considered wrong to force medicate the population.

There's some sort of U.K. teeth joke here, but I'm not sure I have my finger on it. Let's settle for this one: How are British teeth like Anil? They're brown and funky.

But I digress. I think fluoridation is a fascinating thing culturally, given Americans' ostensible rejection of socialized medicine. Probably proof that most Americans will ignore anything that they can't actually see in front of them.

In theory, I whole-heartedly agree. In actuality, I live in Los Angeles and the tap water tastes like ass here. The only way I can handle tap water (like in restaurants) is if I have lemon in it. I may have been spoiled by the very yummy, sweet water in Nebraska, but I just can't do it here in LA.

(That being said, I do have a Brita at home and use bottled water for when I'm out and about.)

Here in Portland (consistently voted one of the best municipal water sources in the country) we have Benson bubblers. Continously flowing water fountains with four spigots that run 9 months a year. Legend has it that Simon Benson had them installed thoughout the city so there would be an alternative to saloons.

So how well the worked?

I used to work at Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta several years ago. At that time they had a joke floating around which was some thing like 'we should pull all the ingredients out of Coke, raise the price & sell it as bottled water'. Ah, the joke became a reality.

On another note... Have you heard Mos Def's song 'New World Water'? I think you'd like it.

I figured there had to be more levels of the scam than simply "paying a 1$ for essentially the same thing my Brita gives me"!

I actually enjoy the taste of tap water more than bottled water, I guess I am a minority in that sense though. Bottled water tastes too lifeless and plain for me. Though I also drank a lot of iron and/or iodine-heavy water from camping when I was younger, and prefer slightly below room temperature water over freezing cold.

I never got on the bottled water bandwagon. It just seemed so...pretentious.

Stop! Stop! I ADMIT it! I frequently buy bottled water. I sometimes pay a buck a bottle, and I'm glad to do so. The real comparison is not "a buck a bottle for the ... so pretentious... bottled water versus the down-to-earth water from my tap (filtered through my Brita brand water filtration system)," it's "I'm away from home. I've got my kids with me, do I want them to drink water or this hideous carbonated beverage?" Hmm. Dasani brand water beverage for a buck versus Coke (or even worse, DIET Coke) brand carbonated beverage for a buck. I'll take the water.

I suppose that I could take my bike bottle and fill it with ice and water, and let it sweat all over the passenger seat of my car. Or better yet, I could fill it with ice and water and stick it in the Igloo brand cooler, with a couple of the Coleman brand refrigerant pods. And then, of course, I'd have to lug that combination around with me, say, to the mall (Not to sound like someone who's jumped on the crass, consumption-crazed-American bandwagon.) Of COURSE when you're in the restaurant you get a glass of tap water (Preferrably with a wedge of lemon or lime hanging from the side). (Hmm. Tap water with ice for free, versus Dasani for a buck?)

It's all in the context. It's not "Only an idiot would pay a buck for something that they could get from the tap for free," it's "Okay, here are my current alternatives, which is the best balanced choice to address my current objectives."

On the other hand, if you're male and drinking unfiltered tap water in the UK, watch out for any signs of man breasts.

many bottled water companies also make tons of money while stealing water right from under the noses of the local communities where their plants are located. the cost of operating a plant is very low and the profits are high.
a nice article i just finished reading, there is no ice mountain explains how ice mountain (a brand of water greatly distributed in the midwest) is sucking water from lake michigan.

I think fluoridation is a fascinating thing culturally, given Americans' ostensible rejection of socialized medicine. Probably proof that most Americans will ignore anything that they can't actually see in front of them.

It's even more interesting than that, as resistance to flouridation was taken as a sign -- a defining sign, really, as you see in Dr. Strangelove -- of crackpot Bircherism by people occupying the same social class that today drinks San Pellegrino by the gallon. I should bang out another few hundred tendetious and poorly researched words on the topic and get back to you on this one, Anil.

Did you see this week's New Yorker? New York may not have tap water for much longer because those pipes running from the aqueduct are near to bursting. I'm looking forward to a return to the days of all-purpose water, used for drinking and shitting along with all its attendent goodies like cholera and typhoid! In the meantime, I'll be stocking up on gallons of Poland Spring...as always.

This may be true for much of the western world, but it certainly doesn't apply to much of the two-thirds world. I just returned from six years in Indonesia where most of the population depends on bottled water. Life would be much more difficult without it. Of course, there aren't any designer lable brands there. Just normal ol' clean water.

The tap water tastes much better in some places than in others. I could never stand the sulfur-laden well water that came from the taps at my grandparents' old house. It stained all the sinks yellow and had a distinct smell of brimstone. It was hard even to brush teeth with it. They drank the stuff all the time.

On the other hand, most people don't like the relatively heavily-chlorinated tap water in Fairfax County, Virginia, but I grew up on the stuff so it tastes like home to me.

Here, the tap water doesn't taste great, but we use a Brita filter. To me the output tastes better than the Poland Spring stuff we used to buy.

I live in LA, when I run my tap it smells like straight bleach. Now NYC might have the best tasting water around but here in LA, I don't really want to drink what I can smell across the room. Though my sink is always sparkling clean.

This topic reminds me of that "and you know that evian is naive spelled backwards" observation...

While I am not pleased to share so many opinions with the John Birch Society, I must also chime in that I am unhappy about the flouride in the water. I usually take one bottle of water with me in the morning when I leave for work, and then I refill it all day long (from a filtered source that ostensibly filters out the I think fluoridation is a fascinating thing culturally, given Americans' ostensible rejection of socialized medicine. Probably proof that most Americans will ignore anything that they can't actually see in front of them.) The funny thing is that I do a fluoride rinse twice a day cause my teeth are just a thin and pretty shell from so many years of Diet Coke abuse. I can see the benefit of the additive, but I refuse it because I think it is unfair and immoral.

I am not sure how I screwed up that last post. I was going to quote Anil's comment, and it ended up dead center.

Anyway:
(from a filtered source that ostensibly filters out the I think fluoride)

I am going to give up now. Messing up a correction is sad like the death of a child.

Django gets it right. The knee-jerk comparison everybody makes is "Why buy bottled water when you get it at home practically free?" But you don't buy bottled water at home. It's not an alternative to tap water, it's an alternative to frucosated, caffeinated, carbonated, and every other sated ated out there. You've got to look at the niche it's really occupying; it isn't that people are drinking less tap water, they're drinking less soda, or coffee, or whatever. Putting aside the fluoridation issue, it's probably healthier, and water can also forestall you from eating more, which helps you lose weight. It's much more than convenience that people are paying for.

Meanwhile the you-can-take-it-with-you angle is very much alive, with Brita and Pur filters, branded refillables, bottle totes, and even the CamelBak.

Personally, I use twist-top Gatorade bottles (you can open them with just your lips, and unlike the pop-tops, you don't weaken your teeth in the process) with Brita-filtered water, frozen overnight, as all-day sippers. They're great for working outside. Unless you have a tote, though, they're harder to carry around on an outing of any length.

And you can't really discount taste as a factor. I grew up on artesian well water, and though I don't spit out either New York's Croton-filtered product or Chicago's properly-distilled lakewater, I much prefer my Brita pitcher to the tap. And if the water tastes better, I'll drink more of it, which is better for me, right?

Anyway, I find it amusing that most folks in the flyover think that New York must have awful-tasting water -- probably holdovers from the days when the East River was a bit of a toilet. But that's not where their water comes from, by a long shot. And the way it gets there is one of the great engineering feats. Hopefully, though, pipe #3 will get finished before either #1 or #2 break.

I don't buy bottled water for myself. But I do buy bottled water for my pet rabbits, because they are sensitive to calcium and my tap water is very hard. Yes, it's quite silly.

Disclaimer: I work as a contractor for Arrowhead Mt. Spring Water in CA, part of Nestle Waters, and anything I say here is my opinion and not the opinion same said company.

I agree with the spirit of Anil's post, but I do disagree with the casual lumping of the purified water products with the ones known as spring water. The processes that the water are put through are similar, but the sources are completely different. Spring water products must meet fairly stringent guidelines in order to be called spring water, including their source, what can be called or considered the same source in the case of companies selling water from many sources under the same name (I know of two or three Nestle companies doing this, one of them being Arrowhead), etc.

I just have to wonder, Anil, what are you trying to say here? I realize that even you said you weren't sure WHAT you were trying to say. Perhaps your post was really about obscene profits made from products very common that are put into pretty packages and sold as something better than what they really are. Are you upset with large companies jumping on the bandwagon of bottled water due to the changing opinions of Americans? Have you ever read about the true scandal of fluoride in the water? (spell or say A - L - C - O - A?) Are you making a point of the incredible amount of packaging waste created by this new hot trend (people should realize they aren't paying for the water, they're paying for the package. The water is probably only about 5% of the cost of each bottle produced, if even that) Are you making a point to say to people that, hey, folks, we still do have an amazingly healthy and excellent public water system in the US, just another of the benefits out of the thousands we take for granted and even forget day by day? Your post brings up some intersting information that kind of gets lost by the lack of a specific reason for the post.

But, still a good Anil post. They always are good and at least you speak what you think and we can believe that you believe what you say.

How do I feel about bottled water? I drink Arrowhead all day (it's in a refrigerator 8 feet from my desk.) and I can't tell the difference between it and anybody else's, purified, spring or tap. unless of course we're talking about Perrier or Calistoga (also Nestle companies). I can, however, tell you that the water in Palm Springs coming through my apartment complexes aging pipes shows visible sediment after a day in a pitcher in the fridge, besides tasting bad most of the time. So I drink Arrowhead in gallon containers there. But if I just bought a Brita, I'd use it instead. It all tastes like water to me.

Jack, thanks for the well-reasoned critique. Of your listed points, I'd say "we still do have an amazingly healthy and excellent public water system in the US" is closest to being the point I was trying to make.

If I had a point.

pipes are the main issue with me, sediment, lead(i imagine this one, since i can't see it), rust, crud, etc...all pour out of the pipes in my apartment. The city's filtering isn't what i'm worried about.

you can google 'water testing' and other variants and find a lot of products--kits, devices, chemical tests--for testing arsenic levels, microbial content, dissolved solids, all sorts of goodies. Primarily for Well users. Making sure your water heater doesn't run so hot can help as well. [i work for a energy/water/education conservation products company]

Bottled water and tap water are both highly regulated. It is your responsiblity as a consumer to learn what the definitions of spring, distilled, purified, artesian etc are. These are different things in the world of water. Its also convenient how many people seem to forget there are people who live on well water. This is NOT regulated by the EPA. Bottled water does not have chlorine in it either, which os what municipal systems use to kill bacteria. If you want to kill all bacteria, go ahead and add some clorox to what you eat and drink. Bottled water is regulated as a food product by the FDA, so if you fear the safety of your bottled water, you must fear everything in the US food supply as well.
The argument about the amount of water used by a water plant from Lake Michigan, is just plain silly. A meat packing plant uses more water per day then a bottled water plant takes from the ground, but I dont hear you stopping food processing.

Please tell me if FREEZING water in a plastic bottle is harmful to your health.

I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. It used to be much, much worse, but now one of the only things I tend to focus on is cold beverages, especially water. I don't drink tap water, only Dasani (Fiji and Aquafina will do in extreme situations). I think if the taste of the water is appealing to an individual, then it shouldn't really matter. It's something I've never been able to change or cure. Even though it's basically filtered tap water, to me, Dasani tastes better than any water I've ever tried.

I heard from a wise old Russian friend of mine the following way of filtering water at home. You take any plastic container (i.e. bottle) and fill it with water. You then commence to freeze it. When about 3 quaters of the water is frozen, you take the bottle out of the freezer and pour away the quater that hasn't frozen. The remainder you let melt and this is the filtered water. The reason apparently being that the water with chemicals and impurities freezes slower (at a lower temperature perhaps?) then pure water. I have done this and the water does taste and feel better. Yet I would like to verify this. If anyone knows whether this is physically and chemically correct, please share your knowledge.