Personally, while I don't buy any branded, single-serve waters, I do actually buy gallon jugs of house-brand "drinking water" from my local grocery store for the taste. Whatever minerals they add "for taste," I prefer it to tap or even spring water.
Ask someone to help you double-blind taste-test FIJI water and your tap water. There is a big difference.
#1) having to carry multiple gallons from the store to the car to the house was getting to be a chore. given the amount of water of i drank, it was a headache. now that i've switched to filtered tap water, it's so much easier.
#2) i received a brochure from the local water municipality that documented all the steps that the water went through to be purified. It was way more involved than I thought. Plus, the purchased filter literature claims to remove impurities to several significant digits - post coming from the tap.
#3) it's cheaper overall. sure there's a fixed cost to buying a filter system, but once it's up and running, it pays for itself.
I would avoid dropping the wedge into the water since you have no idea if the rind is clean.
Why are you eating there if you can't trust them to provide clean food?
Sometimes you're out and you want something to drink but you don't have a container, bottled water is kind of an obvious choice. All the purity shit is just capitalist competition in action. And I still don't understand what is worse about it than bottled Coke or whatever.
Contra the article, I would argue that there's three reasons bottled water became popular:
1) Convenience: no need to tote an empty container around with you, or find one when you're thirsty
2) Status signaling: a.k.a. "tap water is what the proles drink"
3) Collapse of faith in the efficacy of collective action: the rise of Perrier was driven by sales in the US & UK, and occurred during the late '70s and early '80s, the same time as the rise of Reagan and Thatcher and the beginning of the era we live in now. Guarantees of the purity of tap water rested on the authority of government, which people had stopped believing in. The purity of bottled water rested on the authority of the Free Market™, which was more in fashion.
Empty bottle plus tap would be much better for the environment, and probably cost people less over time than bottled water does, but it fails in comparison on all three of those points. And since history shows these are the points people care about, the prospects of the concept don't seem bright; at least not without another major shift in society.
http://www2.epa.gov/laws-regulations/history-clean-water-act
http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/rulesregs/sdwa/index.cfm
Between that, advances in technology and the wider deployment of municipal water supplies, U.S. tap water is probably as clean and safe as it has ever been, at least since the beginning of the industrial era.
I'm not saying that explains 35 gallons a year unless you go out a heck of a lot more than I do, but it is something of a gateway drug, that once you get used to going to the state fair and spending $7 for a brat and ... $2 for the bottled water to go with it, you're on a slippery slope to buying more bottled water later. Look how cheap the bottles are at the store, why I paid $2 for one bottle at the fair, and I can get a dozen bottles at the food store for $3 what an awesome great deal bottled water is I'm gonna buy some for next time I go out...
Of course, it also seems silly to pack a large empty container.
I'm more likely to use a disposable bottle if I'm going to an event, or I'm walking around a city all day as a tourist, and want to be able to ditch the bottle rather than carrying it around empty.
That said, I virtually never buy water, I dislike it on principle and only do so in special circumstances.
I would prefer tap water in all cases. It is never a convenient choice.
edit: If you wanted to legislate effectively (rather than in a Bloombergian manner), just require that tap water be a first class citizen at restaurants (same cups, same sizes), and that the purchase of soda/bottled water cannot be involved in a package discount, unless tap water would give you the same discount.
(Yes, I know it's better for the environment to save plastic. Kroger bottles are not as bad as others, as they feel as thin as a plastic bag, but still I plan to eventually phase them out, but not because of the $)
Also, there's differing qualities of tap water as well, because it does depend on your tap and sink itself.
If you have a good tap, and you are serving the water without carbonation, sure, there's going to be little noticeable difference in general. But try running water directly from an average to low quality tap directly into a soda stream (without any time to even allow chlorine dissipate) and you'll find that's nowhere near as pleasant as a bottle of perrier.
Either way I dont drink bottled water because I dislike tap water. Most of the times I dont have a container or a tap to fill up with water. So I am stuck getting a Dasani or Evian from a gas station or vending machine at work.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle
Yes we have water but I dont like getting up every 10-15 mins to grab a single sip of water from a water fountain. So I go to the vending machine and grab a Dasani bottle I refill for about a week.
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/12/30/chromium-6-found-in-...
I might explore a home filtration system at some point, though, if it is cost effective and reliable.
"The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle."
"...some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law."
"radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways."
And the EPA has not intervened.
from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html
Also:
"Environmental officials in Pennsylvania have failed to adequately regulate the state’s booming natural gas industry, a state report said, reflecting what critics say is weak oversight of the oil and gas industry at a time when drilling is spreading across the United States."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/pennsylvanias-auditor-g...
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/01/does-nyc-water...
LA tapwater is nowhere near as good, in fact it's downright disgusting in some parts of town, but i drink it anyway when i'm at home because buying large amounts of bottled water is a pain in the ass (heavy, bulky) and expensive. sometimes i'll buy some perrier or pellegrino if i want a treat. i've found that if i fill several large mason jars full of water and put them in the fridge, it's a good compromise. a lot of the shittiness just evaporates out. i'll grab one and put it by my bedstand before i go to sleep, for example.
at the office we have the standard 5-gallon jug water delivery service which is the best. i might start getting the service at home, honestly.
I dislike the idea of drinking water that has been circulating through pipes and filters in the city for decades, including through our toilets and showers and huge amounts of chemical waste. Of course, the methods have completely purified the water, but claims that tap water still isn't good are attributed to the sort of last mile dirty pipe system, which is solved by more filtering.
I like the idea of nature filtering the water that I drink. That's why I like the idea of water springs. I would be less interested in spring water that still just comes from municipal water supplies that similarly recycles the water, and would prefer it coming directly from a spring.
For filtering, I just got one of the iSpring reverse osmosis units to filter water for me. It tastes equivalent to the other bottled water brands while being appreciably cheaper than bottled water.
The reason I've gone to some 'extremes' is that in earthquake country the house filter can do double duty for making drinkable water out of pretty much anything that might get into it after an earthquake.
My experience though has been that pretty much a basic charcoal filter like the Brita gets rid of taste issues pretty effectively.
So not only tap water already lacks compared to mineral, just letting it gas out, although can help with taste, is not enough to ensure quality, a filter is recommended. I don't know why you claim a filter is not necessary, I've never seen that.
So, for those situations where you find yourself with your (BPA-free) water bottle empty of course you're going to spring for a bottle of tap water. And since you're afraid of catching Ebola you're not going to use anyone's tap, it has to be a one-way safe and sanitized bottle.
