Tap Water vs Bottled Water

Tap Water vs. Bottled Water
A reprint from yahoo.com news

Hi everyone, I get asked about this a lot, and just happened on a small article that touches on this briefly. I added in some notes to apply it specifically to Flagstaff.

"lug, glug, glug--that’s the sound a ginormous number of us make as we sip bottled water in our cars, at the gym, behind our desks.

The sound you DON’T hear is the thwack of 60 million bottles a day being tossed into U.S. landfills, where they can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

If that’s not enough to turn your conscience a brighter shade of green, add this: Producing those bottles burns through 1.5 million barrels of crude oil annually--enough fuel to keep 100,000 cars running for a year. Recycling helps but reusing is even better. Invest in a couple of portable, dishwasher-safe, stainless steel bottles like Klean Kanteens that won’t leach nasty chemicals into your water. (Don’t get into the habit of refilling the water bottle you just emptied; the polyethylene terephthalate it’s made of breaks down with multiple usings.)

4 REASONS TO TURN ON THE TAP

1. Tap water is tested daily
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, water suppliers are required to provide an annual report on the quality of your local water and to test tap water daily. By comparison, the FDA examines bottled water only weekly, and consumers can’t get the agency’s results. You can easily get the lowdown on your state’s drinking water quality at http://www.epa.gov/safewater/dwinfo/index.html

City of Flagstaff provides this quarterly in the publication "Cityscape" and also provides access to all testing results and a Consumer Confidence Report on demand.

2. Tap water is a bargain
Bottled water costs about 500 times more than tap. If you’re into really fancy labels, up to 1,000 times more.

3. Tap water is a tooth saver
It has more fluoride than bottled water, which helps prevent tooth decay. (Yes, you never outgrow your need for fluoride.)

City of Flagstaff's drinking water is not fluoridated. There is some controversy involved in fluoridation of drinking water.

4. Tap water is often tasty
Some places (New York City for one) have delicious water, but if you don’t love the flavor of yours, the solution is simple: Run your tap water through a Brita or Pur filter to remove most tastes and odors. The average home filter goes for $8.99 and produces the equivalent of 300 large (16.9 ounce) bottles of water. That’s about $0.03 cents a bottle, versus the $1.25 or so you’d pay in a market. "

Most commercially available water filters/purifiers actually only treat water for "aesthetic" qualities such as taste and odor, rather than actual contaminants. Remember, lead, arsenic, and radiochem's are colorless and tasteless. A quick way to remove the chlorine taste (residual chlorine from the disinfection process) is to fill a pitcher and leave it open at room temperature overnight. As tap water reaches room temperature, the dissolved chloride ions (molecules) will naturally dissipate into the air.

I hope that helps to shed some light on this issue. Stay tuned for further posts of scientific inquiry, as it applies to our lives as cyclists. -Gary