| |||||||||||||||
|
Thursday, Mar 6, 2008 @04:42pm CST We can get it from the tap, but these days a lot of us just feel better about getting our water out of a bottle.
In fact we drink more than 7 billion gallons of bottled water each year. But it turns out all those plastic water bottles aren't healthy for the environment. Americans buy 28 billion water bottles a year. The bad news is 80 percent of those bottles end up in landfills. Mainly because most people don't think plastics pay. Most folks look at just the dollar figure. If the market's not there, they're not getting a whole lot there's not a lot of incentive for them to recycle other than it's the right thing to do. While it may be the right thing to do, some people think storing the empty bottles requires too much space. Others don't even mess with it A lot of people think that bottled water is probably a safer product. But it's not gonna be any safer than the tap water. The U.S. EPA strictly regulates tap water and the FDA says safety guidelines for bottled water are significantly less strict than for tap water. The health debate will continue but in the end it's up to the consumer to decide if that trendy bottle of water is really worth it for the environment. |