Is bottled water safer than tap water?
In the old days, bottled water came from a variety of different kinds of plastics. And the plastics had the potential to leach contaminants into the water. These days, most of the water bottles are polyethylene. Those are the clear, soft bottles. You can squeeze it and it will be flexible. Polyethylene does not have the kinds of contaminant issues that we used to worry about from bottled water. So generally, the plastic isn't the concern with bottled water. But bottled water is being promoted as being cleaner and healthier and coming from springs out in the countryside. That is often just pure marketing, and in many cases that's not true, and it could be coming from urban tap water that may have been put through some kind of a filter and really isn't that much better than the standard tap water you could get at your house. So, you have to be concerned that you're being sold a bill of goods with bottled water. It's not necessarily any healthier or freer of bacteria. As a matter of fact, some bottled waters have been shown to have trace levels of benzene, have been shown to have trace levels of bacteria, which are not necessarily good, and may in some cases be worse than public water supplies. So bottled water is not tested nearly as much as public water supplies. No guarantee of it being any better than any other kind of water. It's just more convenient.
