Water in a Bottle

Last year, we gave up bottled water. I'm not going to lie to you - it was hard. I love the taste of Arrowhead Spring water. I was a total water snob. Not only did I stick to bottled water as my sole source of water, it HAD to say spring water on the label. I could not (and still can't) stand the taste of "lesser" waters like Aquafina and Dasani. They tasted like the bottles in which they were packages - just like chemicals. YUCK.

Then, as I traveled along my journey of information regarding what I was (and wasn't) putting into my body and the Earth, I started to learn more about bottled water, and how bad it was. My justification for drinking it was that A) tap water wasn't clean - it couldn't be because it tasted SO BAD and B) I was recycling my empty bottles, so that made it okay to use them. Well, I learned that tap water is plenty clean, so clean in fact that a lot of bottled water is actually just filtered tap water. I also learned that just because I was putting my empties in the recycling bin, it didn't necessarily mean that they were being recycled because the consumer demand for recycled products just isn't high enough at this time to use everything we toss in there.

I came across this video online, and it pretty much sums up the problems with bottled water in a tidy eight minute package.

To be completely honest, I don't know how tap water beat Fiji in taste tests. Maybe Cleveland has really good water, who knows. What I do know is that Fiji water is an environmental disaster and has nearly destroyed the place it comes from. The people who live there are poor and only have access to about 3 gallons of drinking water per week, per person, while the government is getting rich from this stuff. It's sad.

When my husband moved in with me, he brought one of those Brita pitchers with him. I HATED that thing. It always looked grubby, it took up too much room in the refrigerator, and sometimes it had black crap floating in it from the carbon filter. Yuck. I refused to drink from it and after about a year we tossed it.

Now we use a Pur filter right on the faucet. It takes up no room in my fridge, it gets cleaned every night when the dishes are done so it's not grubby, and we no longer have to tote home heavy bottles from the grocery store. Sure, I'm still throwing out the plastic from the filter every couple of months, but since I still can't abide by the flavor of tap water, I think it's a fair compromise instead of going through all those bottles.

Last week, I went a step further and ordered two of these:

Now, I will be able to take my tap water with me and so will my husband! Sure, the bottles were not cheap, but seeing as how I drink a LOT of water each day, when I think about how much money we've saved with just me giving up bottled water, well, this was downright cheap!

Besides, y'all. It's hot pink. :) (not to worry, my husband got a red one)