Water please, hold the bottle

Those of you who know me personally have no doubt heard my rant about the popularity of bottled water in North America. In my opinion, the bottled water industry is based almost entirely on fear mongering about the safety of tap water. Unless you are in a community with no water treatment, drinking bottled water is wasteful, unnecessary, and if anything, more dangerous than drinking tap water. The tap water, unlike the bottled water, is regulated and tested.

The Saturday Globe and Mail has an interesting report about religious groups joining environmental groups in the fight against bottled water. The activists should staple this passage to every bottled water vending machine:

"A one-litre bottle of Dasani brand water, sold at a Toronto supermarket recently for $1.59, retails for about 3,000 times the price of a litre of municipal water from nearby Brampton, where the container was filled. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. filters the municipal water and then adds minerals to improve its taste. Federal product labelling laws do not require bottlers to indicate that their products originally were tap water, but do require companies to say whether it is spring or mineral water."