Bottled water-Do more harm than good? When you buy single-serve bottles of water, your money is actually purchasing water regulated less than tap, plus advertising. For that, you’ll pay more than three times for H2O what you pay for gasoline—$12 per gallon. Single-serving bottled water costs up to 4,000 times as much as tap. It’s not only the cost, of course, that’s the problem. Cities must filter and disinfect tap, which comes from surface water. No federal filtration or disinfection requirements exist for bottled water. City water systems must issue “right to know” reports about what’s in the water. Bottlers successfully killed this requirement for bottled water. Up to 70% of bottled water is unregulated by the Food & Drug Administration, because it never crosses state lines for sale, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. So there may be a health cost, too. Tap water is a local product that needs no packaging. Globally, bottled water accounts for as many as 1.5 million tons of plastic waste annually, according to the Sierra Club. Making the plastic in the bottles requires 47 million gallons of oil annually. And that doesn’t include the jet fuel and gasoline required to transport the bottles—sometimes halfway around the world. In addition, billions of bottles end up in the ground every year. Sadly, only 20% ever get recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The other 80%? Besides landfills, many bottles end up in oceans, posing a risk to marine life. By purchasing bottled water, you’re indirectly raising the price of gasoline and contributing to global climate change. In 2007, the manufacturers of plastic water bottles generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, according to the Pacific