It's quite bad, but consumer water filtration devices are cheap and plentiful. I personally use a water filter at home and work, and carry a decent quality bottle everywhere with me, so I'm not sure why others don't go that route. I have to assume it's just another example of rampant American consumerism.
To be fair in a lot of places a water filter makes sense but in most cities where I assume you're talking about the type of people who buy bottled water when their mains water is just as good (in some cases better), you have a point.
Having flashbacks to putrid dead-rat water in rural New Zealand.. shudder
Water filters are cheap and effective and make the water taste better anyway. I think most people's exposure is from eating lead paint and breathing fumes and particulates (also from paint -previously from gasoline engines). None the less, the US is visibly decaying enough I always drink filtered water (google "big berkey").
I'm from a country with no real guarantees about the water supply. Most people only have a filter installed on their kitchen faucet and just avoid ingesting water from any other taps in the house.
The population of the U.S. is over 300 mil. How many people die or get sick every year because of our drinking water? It's got to be very small if any, otherwise, we would hear about it constantly until it was fixed.
But let's say it is the worst in the world. Bottled water is not the best way to fix the problem. A water filter would be much better in terms of cost per gallon and quality.
Just by you asking the question, highlights how well sales and marketing have worked when it comes to bottled water.
I really don’t want to come off as some sort of condescending euro-snob, but is the state of tap water in the US so bad so that you have to purchase plastic bottles of water?
If you want to make people stop using water bottles you have to improve the water going to their house.
I've been to very few places (in the US) that the water tasted good from the tap. One was a major metro, the others were places with well water.
My parents live in a medium sized Texas city that has tap water that is typically brown, sometimes it comes out of the tap foamy. Some filter it, but many just buy bottled.
I use a simple filter at home to improve taste. However, after living in hurricane and tornado prone areas, I keep a small supply of water on hand (a few cases of bottled) for emergencies.
Filtering tap water at home has been a solved issue for generations. From ceramic water filters (CWF), ceramic candles to reverse osmosis and etc...c’mon dude.
To be fair even in a first world system it's a good idea to filter drinking water again before consuming it. A countertop filtration system is much less expensive than one month of OP's bottled water. $80-200 for the initial setup, $30 every six months to replace the filters... cheaper than $60/mo, probably produces cleaner water in most cases.
Personally, I filter all the water I drink after it leaves the tap where I currently live... most of the population can’t afford additional filtration or has no idea that it may even be necessary. That’s what infuriates me.
Putting a simple filtration system on your tap is a lot cheaper than buying soda-priced water, though. And even if you do buy it, there's no guarantees about the quality of the water in the bottle.
I've recently moved to the US and cannot bring myself to drink tap water. Even though I consciously know that it should be safe, it is as if I was trying to drink water from the toilet. Years of living in a country with untrustworthy tap water do that to you.
Now, the way it is usually done in the US is very wasteful. I mean, packs of bottled water at CostCo? We used returnable 5 gallon containers...
The United States has excellent drinking water, pretty much everywhere. Issues of taste are usually caused by old pipes on the "last mile" of the water's path. So, buy a Brita filter. That's a market that actually makes sense.
With all the obsession over the water supply, why don't people use filters or simply buy glass bottled water? I enjoy German spring water which has a slew of minerals naturally in it including 20 pct calcium by USDA recommended allowance.
The tap water tastes like crap to me, something which doesn't affect others. I taste chlorine and a sweet chemical flavor that American water has, that others view as neutral or delicious. But if it's true about microplastics in the water, what are people waiting for?
A few years ago I worked in an office where people had kept refilling filter jugs for years, and I just started using the tap because the filter was too slow and annoying. Took a few weeks and everyone had stopped using the filter - all it took was seeing someone else drink water from the tap, and gradually people would do the same I did and drink from the tap when the jug was empty and realize it tasted perfectly fine. Probably better than the filter, frankly - I don't want to think about how rarely that filter was replaced and the jug washed.
Point being that while some places do have awful tap water, a lot of people just drink bottled or filtered water because they see people drink bottled or filtered water and copy that without even stopping to consider if their tap water is good enough or not.
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