Living Green: Bottled water

Living Green: Bottled water (Added: December 17, 2009)

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By Lindsay Milbourne
Published: December 17, 2009

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"I can't tell a difference, people tell me they can tell a difference, I can't," says Beth Murray of Myrtle Beach.

Beth Murray has lived in Myrtle Beach for seven months and whether it's here or in any of the other places she's lived around the county, she always drinks water from the tap.

"It's such a waste of money to buy water when you have perfectly good water. I mean where I've lived, I've always had good water."

But Murray says there are lots of people who buy bottled water for convenience and for one other reason.

"They're scared. Through things they've heard or media," she says.

Murray doesn't use a filter on her tap water at home, but say's for people who are concerned with the water quality, buying a water filter is a good idea. Most water filters cost anywhere from twenty to fifty dollars and can filter about 100 gallons of water. They can remove chemicals and improve the taste of tap water. Murray says tap water can be just as convenient as bottled water, if you fill a reusable water bottle to bring when you are out and about.

"If i need something to drink, and the water in the machine is a dollar, I'm not going to buy it," she says.

And the people who do buy it, often throw it away. Over 60 million water bottles are thrown out everyday in the us.

"The plastic, the lids, you see them all over in the garbage, you know i just think that's not good," says Murray.

So let's do the math. If you buy a 24 pack of bottled water for about 6 bucks every two weeks your yearly cost is one hundred and forty four dollars. If you buy a water filter like Brita, the pitcher costs around twenty five dollars and each replacement filter costs about eight dollars. If you buy six of them a year, your pay about seventy three dollars. That's around sixty dollars cheaper than the bottled water option.

Surprisingly, the Natural Resource Defense Council estimates twenty five percent or more of bottled water is nothing more than tap water in a bottle-sometimes treated, and sometimes not.

"I think most people, just, they don't realize it," says Murray

But it's people like Beth Murray who skip on bottled water who do their part to help save the environment.

Recently, one town in Australia banned the selling bottled water. This will help to reduce the nearly 600 million liters of bottled water the continent consumes each year.