I love tap water, in fact that is all I drink. There are none of those trumped up claims attached to tap water except that it is safe and cheap to drink. Even if you don’t think the fluoride that they add to it is any good for you, you can simply filter it out with little effort.
If you are some of the few fortunate humans on the planet to be connected to clean drinking water, then there is no better place to go if you are thirsty. Once you have had tap, you won’t go back!
On the other hand, there is bottled water, which is a product that is usually no cleaner than the water that flows from your tap. The so called demand for this product is purely manufactured by beverage companies trying to make a buck, and sucker us along for the ride.
So what is the real story about bottled water, and that of our tap water? Well, I did some research and found a few videos that explain it all.
Firstly to lay down the foundations, here is The Story of Bottled Water by Annie Leonard.
Next is one of my favourites, Tear Of a Cloud, by Do The Green Thing. When life’s a bitch, grab a Mitch! This is a parody of manufactured demand.
Then finally, there is another little ditty about Tap (water that is), called Tip, Top, Tap and is a little like a Noel Coward song! Again this video is by Do The Green Thing.
- Australians spent $385 million on 250 million litres of bottled water in 2006.
- It takes 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a typical one-litre plastic bottle — or 850 million megajoules to bottle 250 million litres of water.
- A barrel of oil has 6000 megajoules, so it takes 141,666 barrels of oil to make the PET plastic.
- The energy required to bring bottled water to market — converting the PET plastic into bottles, bottling the water, transporting and refrigerating the bottled water — means the amount of oil required equals 20 per cent of the bottle’s volume.
- For 250 million litres of water, which equals 50 million litres of oil — 314,465 barrels of oil.
- In addition to the water in bottles, twice as much water is also used in the production process. So that every litre sold represents three litres of water.
- Drinking water out of a tap uses only 0.2 megajoules according to EPA Victoria.