Freezing in NH

A Battle Between the Bottle and the Faucet

THOSE eight daily glasses of water you’re supposed to drink for good health? They will cost you $0.00135 — about 49 cents a year — if you take it from a New York City tap.

Or, city officials suggest, you could spend 2,900 times as much, roughly $1,400 yearly, by drinking bottled water. For the extra money, they say, you get the added responsibility for piling on to the nation’s waste heap and encouraging more of the industrial emissions that are heating up the planet.

Yes, switching to tap is a good way to spend less.  The markup is worse in a restaurant (especially in NYC).  But there are downsides:

“The tap water quality is fine in most of the United States,” said John D. Sicher Jr., editor and publisher at Beverage Digest, a trade publication. “The issue is convenience and shifting consumer preference. It’s not so easy, walking down Third Avenue on a hot day, to get a glass of tap water.”

But you can buy a bottle a month or so and keep rinsing it out and reusing it.  I admit to buying bottled water when traveling (in the airport…) and when my current reused bottle is starting to look bad. 

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under articles, frugality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.