Bottled Water

The first site a clicked on after typing "bottled water" into the search bar on Google was the site for Aqua Falls Bottled Water. This site provides information for the company that distributes Aqua Falls, Glacier Mountain, Mountain Valley Spring, and Diamond Spring bottled water. After briefly looking over the company's website and services, two things really jumped out at me that I had not realized before:

1. Glacier Mountain bottled water actually comes from a spring in Pine Grove, Ohio. This surprised me because with a name like Glacier Mountain one would assume the water came from the snow and ice covered peaks of the mountains and last time I checked there weren't many snow covered mountains anywhere in Ohio.

2. Another thing I noticed when looking over the company's website was the process the company uses to go about filtering the water. Using reverse osmosis and a 13-step filtration process. Looking over this process my mind quickly wandered to the slide we reviewed in class showing the steps our tap water takes to reach our water towers. To me the two don't seem all that different.

Source:
http://www.aquafallswater.com/index.php

The second site I found was an article on National Geographic's webside titled "Bottled Water Isn't Healthier Than Tap, Reports Reveals." In this article I found several interesting points that I hadn't been aware of:

1. One fact that jumped out at me was that, while I already knew that bottled water cost nearly 10,000 times more than tap water and that much of the cost was due to packaging, a big portion of the cost of bottled water is also due to transportation and shipping costs. According to the article nearly a quarter of all bottled water is shipped across national borders, and the french brand Evion exports between 50 and 60% of its product.

2. I was also surprised to learn that in some cases bottled water can actually be more unhealthy than tap water. According to Nick Reeves, the executive director of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management in Great Britain, "the high mineral content of some bottled waters makes them unsuitable for feeding babies and young children."

Source:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0224_060224_bottled_water.html