Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles,

the number used in the US every five minutes.

Photo by Chris Jordan. Image found at TreeHugger.

I'm not going to re-write what other people have said perfectly well elsewhere on-line. Even the most cursory of Google searches will result in plenty of anti-plastic info. All I'll do here is summarize the key points and link to the sources.

1. Bottled water is no more pure or healthy than tap water. And in the minority of places in the US where tap water isn't up to standards, inexpensive home filters will help.
2. "Bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more per gallon than tap water."
3. "Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year - and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide (Source: Pacific Institute)."
4. "Each year more than 4 billion pounds of PET plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter."

Bottom line: Bottled water costs too much. Too much money. Too much oil. And creates too much garbage.

Want to read more and research it yourself? Here are some places to start:

Think Outside The Bottle

Take Back the Tap, a report by Food and Water Watch

And for an excellent overview of the economic issues from a relatively mainstream and not particularly "green" source: "Message in a Bottle," from the magazine, Fast Company. One of the most chilling quotes from that article:

And in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.

Runner up most disturbing fact from the same article: "24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi."