Most tap water tastes terrible. Even filtered tap.
All filters are definitely not equal. Brita, which I prefer, pretty much takes out only the chlorine. Pur, which my wife prefers, takes out practically everything, including even some nasty bacteria. That spans the entire gamut from barely filtered to completely filtered. I'm sure if you keep trying you'll find an under-the-sink filter that you like the taste of.
So what then? What should we do? I love bottled water.
Back when the bottled water craze first started, Consumer Reports did a blindfold-test of all the major brands. (You could do that back then, there weren't ten thousand of them.) The winner? Well they threw in a ringer without telling anybody: New York City tap water. I can't believe the city hasn't gotten into the act and begun marketing it. Just shows you how poor the lefties are at economics.
I know the plastic starts to break down in the bottled water after a few hours of being open.
I think you're all right in that regard if you just drink the water no matter how long it takes to finish it, even if you put in in the fridge overnight. The problem is that people reuse the bottles for weeks or months and that is a statistical health risk.
And I'm aware of some bottled water being no better than tap.
Well remember: All you need to do to obtain water that satisfies every legal defintion of "purified" is to open your tap! We have absolutely no way of knowing whether some of those bottled brands were filled from a municipal tap and you're paying for the fancy label and the profits.
I read the only thing you should use your tap water for is washing floors.
That's irrational risk analysis. Sure, you can reduce your risk of being killed by your imperfect municipal environment by .00000001% or something like that by not drinking the municipal water. But as you've noted, bottled water is deliberately sold in easily degradable bottles and they don't wait until you throw them away to start degrading. There's some chemicals you don't want in your body, and does anybody here have enough data to calculate the relative risk of those two water sources? But look at the economics. Bottled water is the biggest ripoff since they realized that people would pay for Windows. Venerable old companies like Nestle have launched bottled water divisions that almost bring in more income--at an astronomical profit margin since it's just frelling
water--than their traditional lines of business. Look at all the money that is being spent on bottled water. What if all those environmentally conscious, health-aware, fashion-trendy, advertising-gullible consumers simply donated that money to the charity of their choice? Maybe one water drinker per century would die from the poisons in tap water, but they could save the lives of millions of starving Third World babies. How's that for rational risk analysis?
"The water in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. is very poor and is getting worse. Contaminants, bacteria, minerals and chemicals in tap water are masked with heavy doses of chlorine and tap water, in addition to being unhealthy, tastes and smells terrible."
Nothing works in DC. It doesn't have a state!
It is run directly by the federal government. What do you expect??? NoVa is totally dysfunctional. The state government in Richmond is dominated by traditional rednecks, who don't feel like making life pleasant for the Yankees, black people, immigrants, college graduates, and other undesirables who live in the D.C. suburbs of Fairfax and Arlington County and work for the DamnYankee government. Their transportation system, storm drains, water supply, everything is totally screwed up and the state goverment loves it that way. I live in my home away from home right across the river in Montgomery County, MD, and we have some of the best water in the country, from the same source!
Why do you have to turn a perfectly good/interesting discussion into a personal attack? Why do you have to cr@p on my threads/posts?
Sandy, your making peace with the principles of this forum and becoming a respectable member is duly noted. If people are still hanging onto some of the things you said when you were new here... well we all have to deal with the consequences of things we've done in the past. My advice to you is to simply ignore these comments, act like you didn't even notice them. If you don't entertain people by making angry responses to their jibes, they'll get tired of posting them. Not to mention if the moderators see someone making personal attacks against a member who is so scrupulously polite that she doesn't even talk back, guess who will get busted? Irony can be delicious.
