Water is absolutely essential for living beings. Having a safe supply of water is of the utmost importance in order to live a safe and healthy life. In today’s world, we have become so concerned with a safe water supply that we are spending more and more cash every day on bottled water. The problem with this huge expenditure on water is that we are spending this money without a great deal of info on where this so-called safe water is coming from. We are also spending all of this money without gathering much info on the consequences of making water such a commercial product.
The cities of the US spend a great deal of money to insure that their inhabitants are provided with clean and safe drinking water. However, bottled water companies have also spent large amounts of money spreading information that would have people believe that public drinking water can’t be trusted to be safe. Marketing campaigns by bottled water companies have done an incredibly successful job of convincing people that the only way they can be sure that their drinking water is safe is to spend cash on bottled water. So what is the problem then? If people want to buy drinking water out of bottles, why shouldn’t they, especially if there is a greater guarantee that bottled water is more safe than tap water?
The basic problem is that much of the drinking water that bottled water companies sell actually comes from cities’ municipal water supplies. What this means is that many bottled water companies simply buy their water from the municipal water supply and bottle it up. They lead one to believe that their water is safe, as opposed to tap water. But if you have pipes that are not very old, you are receiving the same safe water out of your tap that you will find in most bottled waters, and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get it. Many studies have been done showing that tap water is often no less safe than bottled waters.
While there is no problem with someone spending their cash on bottled water, believing some companies’ claims that their water is safer than tap water is misguided. The real danger that comes about with the growing obsession with spending premiums for water is the move towards the privatization of water. Do we, as a society, really want to have our drinking water, a basic necessity of life, in the hands of a few companies who will only give it to us for as high a price as they wish, rather than being held as a public trust, given out to the populace as a basic human need?
Other articles of interest:
Posted by Sara 
November 2007