Tap water is good for you & the environment!

Recently San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that city departments and agencies will not buy bottled water. Salt Lake City has issued a similar directive. Tap water is in!

Americans pitch 50 billion water bottles a year into landfills -- in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic. And 24% of the bottled water we buy is simply tap water repackaged by Coca-Cola (KO, news, msgs) and PepsiCo (PEP, news, msgs).

Tap water is as good for you as bottled watered unless, of course, you live in Waukesha with its radium contaminated H20. And tap water is much much cheaper.

If you drink the suggested eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents. That's a lot of money for convenience.

And bottled water in plastic bottles is bad for the environment. All those bottles are made from natural gas and petroleum. It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the bottles US citizens consume each year. Only 23% of these bottles are recycled.

If we increased that to 80% it would be the equivalent of taking 2.4 million cars off the road each year!

If we raised recycling to only 25%, we wold save enough crude oil to provide electricity to 600,000 American homes each year.

About 1 billion bottles of water a week are moved around in ships, trains and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. That's a lot of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere to deliver our bottled water.

Drink tap water. It's good for you. It will save you money and preserve the environment! That's what I call a win win. The only losers will be Coke, Pepsi and the other major bottled water pitchmen!