1. It's expensive: According to calculations by the Natural Resources Defense Council, bottled water can cost from 240 to up to 10,000 times more per gallon than water from the faucet.
2. It may not be safer than tap water: Despite popular misperceptions (spawned primarily by advertising), bottled water is not regulated as strictly as tap water. In fact, unlike tap water, regulations allow bottled water to contain some contamination by E.coli or fecal coliform and don't require disinfection for Cryptosporidium or Giardia. And, as Consumer Reports tests discovered, unhealthy chemicals can migrate from plastic bottles into the water.
3. Sometimes bottled water IS tap water: In spite of the springs, mountains and other bucolic scenes depicted on labels, some bottled water is nothing more than tap water, NRDC and Consumer Reports have found. Aquafina, for example, is drawn from the municipal water supplies of Detroit, Fresno, and other cities.
4. It creates mountains of plastic waste: An estimated 1.5 million tons of plastic is manufactured from petrochemicals each year to package water, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1999 alone, about 1 million tons of plastic bottles wound up in U.S. trash bins, the EPA estimates. In places like New York City, where plastic recycling has been cancelled, all those water bottles go straight into a landfill.
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