Tap water Vs bottled water free essay sample

The sun rises high above the hot and humid park. My friends were having a soccer tournament that day. I was so thirsty. We had to go back to my car for more water. I had run out of water half an hour ago, and my cousins were out or running dangerously low on the potion of life. The 98-degree soccer field had absorbed the fluids from my body like a grape dehydrator to make raisins. We finally reached my car. I quickly reach for the trunk of the car reached into the cooler, and I grabbed a bottle of water. I cracked the seal, threw my head back, and gradually chugged two-third of the bottle. So refreshing I thought to my self as I began throwing bottles of water to my cousin Sara and San. I was used to drinking bottled water when I was out enjoying an event at a park. I finish the bottle and put it into a recycling trash bag. This is where the majority of the use bottles of water go after they are empty. The bottled water market went skyrocket over the last decade. We could go into any market, deli, or restaurant in America and buy a bottle of water for one variety or another. Will we always need this much-bottled water? We should not drink bottled water out of convenience, because of the economic and environmental consequences. A large amount of  bottled water is just domestic water. The tap water is then processed and bottled by the distributor. In fact, Aquafina and Dasani, which are two of the largest bottling companies and are owned by Pepsi and Coke, are merely treated domestic water. â€Å"In 2006, 44 percent of the bottled water sold in the United Sates came from domestic supplies and was labeled drinking water or purified water.† So why are we spending so much on for this tap water, which up to thousands of times the cost of average tap water, depending which brand it came from? According to Drop the Prop, â€Å"Americans spend over $15 billion each year on bottled water. World-wide the bottled water market is $50 billion, â€Å"the site says in its bottled water be statistic page (1-2). I once thought that I was paying this valuable amount for bottled water because I was getting a purer, tastier, and safer water to drink. While it may taste delicious then tap water it may not be purer or safer. The safety and purity of bottled water compared to domestic tap water raises some big questions with me as well as others. We sometimes noticed that bottled water label designs with mountain springs and glaciers on them. This is saying that the water comes from a unique source when in fact it may not. However, there are regulations preventing companies from labeling the contents spring or glacial water if it is not what are shows to be. Water from domestic water sources must be labeled as such, unless it has been treated or purified. This is one way bottled water companies mislead consumers. They take domestic water and treat it through reverse purification and in doing so they don’t have to tell us that it’s just basically filtered tap water. The FDA does not regulate bottled water that is sold in the state that produced it, but bottled water that is sold out of state is. We can imagine many smaller companies only sell their water in state. In doing so, they are only subject to state regulations, and often states do not have the manpower to appropriately regulate them. The FDA regulates some bottled water and individual states regulate some bottled water. The EPA regulates tap water and has much higher restrictions than does the FDA or state regulations on bottled water. Bottled water companies do not have to report violations to state officials or the FDA. Consumers also have yearly reports available to them on their domestic tap water. Most bottled water companies do not have to make this information available either. California is the only U.S. state that is required by state law to do so. I believe that we should have the  privileged to the information of what contaminates are in the bottled water we drink. We should be allowed to access to the information of what’s in our city’s domestic water supply so why not the same with bottled water? I know I want to know what chemicals and bacteria’s are in the water I’m drinking. Chemical such as arsenic, chloroform, bromodichloromethane, dibromochloromethane, and DEHP all of which are cancer causing contaminates. Bacteria’s such as coliform and giardia. These can be an indicator of fecal matter in the water supply. E. coli is one such coliform bacteria that is harmful to humans. When everybody is trying to go green and recycle his or her bottles. This brings up the question about where are all these empty water bottles going when they are empty and no longer being used? The fact is that most water bottles used in the United States are discarded and not recycled. An estimated 50 billion water bottles were drunk in the United States. So what happens to all those bottles? Some estimates say that up to 80% of those 50 billion bottles go into our landfills. Some say it’s closer to 70%. That is a lot of plastics going into our landfills. Some people say that they bottled water because it tastes better than their domestic water or that their tap water has high levels of certain contaminates in it and they don’t want it to affect their health in a negative way. Some people’s water that comes from their tap may taste bad or have harmful chemicals in it, but most of the time that can be fixed with a simple filtration system. Either by buying a water pitcher with a carbon filter in it or by buying a filter that connects to the tap. You can even buy a whole house filtration system. Both of these fixes are far cheaper and safer to the environment than buying bottled water. We can reduce our expenses by reducing or eliminating the bottled water that we buy. These days, in the struggling economy, every little bit helps. Bottled water is not really much safer than your average domestic tap water, and if taste or contaminates are an issue people should filter and bottle their own water. We as a society are starting to lean toward green, and so by cutting down bottled water and the amount of plastic we are polluting our environment with. W should not be destroying our environment just because bottled water is convenient for us to have when we are â€Å"on the go.†