by Adriana Noton

Since organisms on Earth are made of mostly water and usually must drink large quantities daily, the choice in drinking source is very important. In the last hundred years or so, choices have become increasingly broad, and questions have arisen, such as about the safety of tap water vs filtered water. The answer to this question has unfortunately been quite muddied by marketing campaigns pushing bottled and environmental ones urging people to drink tap.

Because of the growing numbers of people choosing to drink bottled water, campaigns have been launched to let them know how bad that choice is for the environment. Bottles for drinks are made of plastic, which is made from oil, the production and refinement of which is not ecologically friendly. Then, once the bottles are used, they are almost always discarded in the trash, not recycling. These bottles end up in the landfill, where they take hundreds or thousands of years to degrade. If they manage to be recycled, that requires energy as well. In terms of being ecologically friendly, bottled drinks are not a good choice.

Even though it may not be as green, many people have been sold on bottled water as a safer alternative to tap. However, this picture is not usually accurate. In the United States, the testing requirements for bottled are much less stringent than those for city tap. This includes testing for things like bacteria, toxic chemicals, and heavy metals.

A United States-based study have proven that some bottled brands have unsafe levels of contaminants. The study can only be expected to show the picture at that point in time, and thus means that all bottled brands need to be looked at with suspicion as potentially dangerous. The conclusion reached is that bottled is definitely not always safer than tap.

But bottled being less safe than tap doesn’t necessarily mean that tap is completely safe. People concerned with both the safety of tap and the eco-friendliness of bottled can make a third choice– filtered. This can be the type purchased from a company that provides it in large, reusable bottles, or a personal, home filtration device. Monetarily, in-home devices are far superior.

Many of the brands of bottled that people assume are from a spring or some other ‘pure’ location are actually just additionally purified tap. This means that the same effect, minus the negative environmental impact of the bottles and the price, can be achieved with an in-home filtration device. The resulting liquid will be nearly identical to these kinds of bottled.

Choosing an in-home purification device will let you achieve safer, cleaner water than either bottled or straight tap. You can be assured that the tap that goes in conforms to strict municipal standards, but the output will be free of any missed contaminants and the city’s additives. Chlorine, chloramine and fluoride are concerns for some people, but a purification device will remove them.

The question of tap water vs filtered water is largely a matter of personal preference. Bottled is expensive and ecologically, a poor choice. But personal, in-home filtration systems are both economical and very effective. However, since tap is held to very high standards, most authorities do not think that additionally purifying it is necessary.