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Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

> There's a worrying number of people in the world living in places with perfectly potable water, but who insist on drinking only environmentally-damaging bottled water through some superstitious belief that it's better for them.

It always seems odd that bottled water gets trashed a lot more than bottled soda, when soda is both worse for the consumer's health, and probably has a higher environmental footprint (since it's not just the water, but the water plus whatever sweeteners and chemicals get added).

True, soda doesn't taste the same as tap water, but bottled water doesn't taste the same as tap water a lot of the time, either. Some people also prefer the convenience of buying a bottle of water, and it would seem strange to say: "Hey, it's fine to buy something in the bottle if you're doing so for the flavor, but if you're doing so for the sake of convenience, that's terrible."

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If every house had a Coke faucet that could supply limitless supplies of soda nearly free, your argument might be more appropriate.

You'll find plenty of people arguing against sodas in threads that talk about soda, this one, however is about the water, no one is suggesting that soda is a better alternative.

You seem to have missed the two reasons I gave for why people may want to buy bottled water. Yes, people have faucets, but the water coming out of your tap often tastes different from the water you buy (yes, it might also be coming out of a tap, but there are many taps across the U.S. with varying taste). And there are various levels of purification - if people really believe that tap water is exactly the same as purified water, then home water filters are an enormous scam. But I've never heard anyone argue that.

Another reason people might buy a bottle of water is because of convenience - if someone's taking a long drive, for example, it's easier to buy a bottle of water at a gas station and drink it periodically than pull over every time they want to drink.

The reason I bring up soda is because there's sometimes less animosity towards soda than bottled water. Some schools will even ban bottled water, but allow bottled soda[1] - naturally leading to an increase in the less healthy option.

[1] http://grist.org/article/plastic-water-bottle-ban-leads-to-u...

When I lived in a house with water that had a weird chlorinated taste, I bought an under-sink filter that rendered the water tasteless. 3000 gallons per filter, or around 24,000 bottles worth. Or around a penny per gallon (including the faucet dispenser.... about a third of that for the filter only)

When I go for a drive, I take a refillable bottle with me, and generally fill it up at the hotel in the morning. Though I will admit to buying a bottled water from time to time.

But I don't think that a significant percentage of the 50 billion water bottles sold every year are going to people that don't have convenient access to tap water.

I guess this is what I don't understand. Whenever this comes up, people usually act as if bottled water is no different than what comes out of people's taps. As the conversation goes on, though, people start talking about the filtration systems they've bought, or about having the water tested.

If we all know that tap water in many cases isn't the equivalent of filtered water, or that tap water can vary from location to location, why do these conversation invariably always start by pretending that there's no difference between bottled water and water straight from someone's tap?

Because they live in a society with unreliable tap water, but would like to pretend they don’t, since they realize that tap water could be made dependable (as it is in many places), and by pushing for tap water to be seen as normally dependable, they can generate more complaints from people where it isn’t dependable, which, finally, should make tap water more dependable in the long run.

I live in the SF Bay area now and use no filter and the water is fine.

My parents have a well and when they were concerned with their water they subscribed to a water delivery service that dropped off reusable 5 gallon bottles every couple weeks that is still orders of magnitude better than individual bottles. (Each 5 gallon bottle replaces 40 16 oz bottles and is refilled)

One of their neighbors installed a big (200 gallon?) water tank and hired a service to refill it. My parents ultimately ended up installing a filtering system when it became clear that the well wasn't going to get better. Which would have been cheaper that the water deliveries long term, but less than 2 years later the city ended up bringing municipal water to their neighborhood.

There are lots of more environmentally friendly alternatives to single serve bottles.

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