Is Bottled Water Worth the Money?

There was a commercial on television last night that said Americans consumed enough bottled water last year for the bottles to be lined up and wrapped around the earth 190 times. The point of the commercial was to show the impact of bottled water on our landfills and our environment as a whole. I immediately thought of money.

Think about how much money it costs your family to drink bottled water ever year. If your family goes through a case or two of bottled water a week, you’re spending anywhere from $3 to $14 a week, or $156 to $728 a year on something you could get from the faucet in your home. Did you know that most bottled water comes from the same source as the water in your house? Some of it comes from springs thousands of feet below the ground, but the majority of it comes from municipal water sources, just like the water in your home. It’s just filtered. Read the label on your bottled water. It might surprise you.

There are several more economical ways to get equal or better quality water than what comes from the typical bottle. Try a filter that mounts on your faucet. They average $20 for the initial system and $10 to $15 for replacement filters. One filter lasts the equivalent of at least 300 bottles of water. The cost for filters in one year would run you $65 to $130, and you would keep thousands of bottles from ever reaching the landfill.

There are other more permanent options that require a larger investment upfront but last a lot longer. When my husband and I moved into our house 12 years ago, we had a water softener installed. It cost us $4,000, but we’ve never had to replace it, and it came with a reverse osmosis unit that goes under the kitchen sink. The filters last for years, and our water is 10 times better than bottled water. We use BPA free and aluminum water bottles when we’re not at home, and we use regular cups when we are at home. Our family drinks several gallons of water a day, which means the system paid for itself a long time ago.

If you live in a place where the drinking water just isn’t safe, you may be forced to use bottled water. Most of us have access to perfectly safe water, though. We could save ourselves a lot money and save our environment a lot of harm by being more sensible about how we consume our water.