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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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