Bottled vs Tap Water

"The purest water in the world, sourced from the crystal clear springs of Alaska"...We've all heard this type of thing before, so what's the deal? Is bottled water actually better than tap water? Not always, in fact, rarely. It's all just fancy marketing. In reality, bottled water is just water. That fact isn't stopping people from buying a lot of it though, water sales are estimated at between $50 and $100 billion annually, with the market expanding at a rate of 7% per year. The reality is that bottled water is costly and wasteful.
Consider this: Pepsi's H2GO or Coca-Cola's PUMP bottled water - big sellers, are both sold in 750ml sizes and can be purchased for approx $3. These two brands are essentially just filtered tap water, bottled close to the distribution point. In NZ most municipal water costs less than one cent per five litres. Now consider another widely sold liquid, petrol. It has to be sourced, pumped out of the ground, shipped to a refinery (often halfway across the world), and then shipped again to your local gas station. In NZ the average price of petrol per litre is around $1.70. In the same petrol station you can buy one litre of water for over $3, which is made locally and transported a mere few hundred kilometres - it's no surprise it's a growing industry.
Now here's the clincher, bottled water, rather than being roughly equal or perhaps slightly superior in quality to tap water, is, in many cases, actually of lower quality than tap water. This is due to different regulations on the bottled water industry and municipal water treatment plants, bottled water is under far laxer safety codes and regulations. We won't even mention here the fact that bottled water generates 1.5 million tonnes of plastic waste per ear and requires around 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce, because that would just be petty...
So why do you buy bottled water? Convenience, it's a good alternative to drinks high in sugar or caffeine. So what do you do? Buy a drink bottle and fill it up from the tap every morning. If you're really concerned about the quality of your tap water, buy a filter, they're cheap and in the long run will save you a lot of cash.