If you drink bottled water (or soda), you may want to remember this.

Drinking water out of a house because your municipality provides clean, safe drinking water as a basic human right…

~ vs. ~

It’s no contest.

The linked words below represent most of the resources and blogs we’ve put together over the past two years regarding this issue. Two of them are purty funny. ~ ed. PS: If you’re drinking bottled water, you’ll want to read the below.

Tap water is dirty and full of flouride and sits around in pipes. Bottled water comes from a spring and is tested for purity.

Right?

Guess which one is Safest? The One Surprising Truth about the Bottled Water you Drink.

Furthermore, there’s few things more carbon intensive (read, wasteful—climate change producing) than trucking around something heavy like water. This goes not only for bottled water, but soda, wine, beer, detergent, any liquid you could be drinking locally or, in the case of detergent, doing away with the liquid factor entirely.

The oft-overlooked drinking fountain is perhaps our greatest plastic-water-bottle killer. Got a drinking fountain, you don’t need a plastic water bottle. Or, of course, bring your own bottle. We sell a “mindful” Elephant Klean Kanteen that works for coffee, tea, or hot or cold water.

But there’s another difference between tap and bottled water. Bottle vs. Tap:

‘Not one drop’ of Poland Spring bottled water is from a spring, lawsuit claims.

Fiji Water once ran an ad campaign stating “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland”. The city of Cleaveland responded by testing both Fiji water and their own tap water. They found 6.3 micrograms of arsenic in Fiji water, and none in their own.

Another: > After FIJI Water ran an ad joking that it “wasn’t bottled in Cleveland,” the Cleveland Water Department proved that Fiji Water contained the highest levels of arsenic and other contaminants when compared to Cleveland tap water and other bottled brands.

Tap water in Canada is held to a higher health standard than bottled water.

And: the Environmental Protection Agency regulations for tap water are “actually stricter than the Food and Drug Administration regulations for bottled water.”

One more reason not to drink bottled water: the bottle is toxic for our environment and health:

Bonus: we *can* save our earth.

One thing we know is horrible for our water:

Relephant: how to fight back against Ocean Plastic:

Image: Advertising, via Flickr.