I often joke about bottled water. Even though I am a voracious consumer of the stuff, it sometimes seems so silly. I imagine an enterprising guy in Brooklyn filling plastic bottles with the flow from his kitchen tap. He slaps on a label with a fancy French name, and bingo — easy money.

I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t true, but I quiet my doubts with visions of natural springs in the French Alps or in tropical locales in the South Pacific. Evian, Volvic, Fiji — the names themselves imply health and vitality and in the case of Ethos Water, a willingness to give back.

But what’s really in these bottles? Is prepackaged water better than drinking what comes out of the tap? And is it worth the pollution and cost — according to the Earth Policy Institute global consumption of bottled water has reached 41 billion gallons annually using 2.7 million tons of plastic and sold at as much as $10 a gallon.

Though not a drop of my New York City tap water passes my lips, I understand that bottled water does not guarantee safety. The Natural Resources Defense Council carried out a four-year review of the bottled water industry and concluded that there is no assurance that water that comes out of a bottle is cleaner or safer than tap water. The Defense Council validates my joke by estimating that 25 percent of bottled water is “really just tap water in a bottle — sometimes further treated, sometimes not.”

[via National Geographic News]

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