91–100 of 383 posts
Distilled water and glass bottles are the way to go. You can get a small distiller for your home relatively cheaply.
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I guess it's just the places in the US I've lived in that have safe tap water.
Yes, just the vast majority of the US (geographically and population wise) has incredibly good tap water, with a long tail of famously bad exceptions to the rule.
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Where I live they are all glass bottles, so I am not sure how plastic enters in the first place.
Yeah, I was under the impression they only came in glass so the fact that they have the lowest amount of plastic could implicate the bottle itself as the primary source. Perhaps the low amount in SP is from that seal in the bottle cap?
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In at least a couple of European countries it is well known that unless your city has specific problems tap water is better than bottled water. The reason being that (except some cases of corruption...) legal limit are much stricter for tap water. Better in impurities at the very least, the taste is usually quite worse.
While that is the common story, I am not entirely convinced. It is presumably true that there are more controls for tap water. But those controls still only test a limited number of substances. One story that goes around a lot is for example the claim that tap water contains a lot of hormones from all the contraceptive pills women take and then flush out of their body into the water system. That seems to not be contr…
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Well, for microplastics. If you live e.g. in the Bay Area, your tap water instead has a good chance of having a good helping of hexavalent chromium[1], which... not too healthy. (Neither are arsenic, bromium, etc.) Pick your poison. Literally. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tap-water-Bay-Area-datab...
Is this something that would be removed with common cheap consumer filters? (such as Britta) I drink a lot of tap water, but always put it through a filter of some sort.
https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/ has a pretty decent guide.
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In at least a couple of European countries it is well known that unless your city has specific problems tap water is better than bottled water. The reason being that (except some cases of corruption...) legal limit are much stricter for tap water. Better in impurities at the very least, the taste is usually quite worse.
Living in Germany/Berlin and can confirm. Our tap water is excellent and is way cleaner than all bottled water you can buy. Keep in mind, bottled water is also kept around way longer and has the time to „breed“. In tests, the tap water is consistently less contaminated. I recommend everyone to just stick to it. As an anecdote: you can let your tap water be tested for free if you have a newborn to ensure and confirm t…
Without doubt? We just found out that they are microplastics in bottled water, how can you be sure there aren't things in tap water that we haven't discovered yet?
I was under the impression Gerolsteiner and San Pellegrino were from deep under ground springs where it took the water decades or more to filter down into the source where the bottler draws it from. Are the plastics somehow in the source or are they being introduced in another way, perhaps when the bottles are washed, handled, etc before filling?
If you dig down to the results, San Pellegrino is one of the lowest: https://orbmedia.org/stories/plus-plastic/ About halfway down the page. The graphs make it look like they didn't take too many samples per brand though.
It is probable that a significant contamination factor is the plastic bottle itself, which would explain why San Pellegrino is low on the list.
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Is Berlin (as opposed to other areas of Germany) culturally ok with drinking tap water?
I'd say all of Germany is culturally very much ok with drinking tap water, Berlin not much more or less than other regions. People who drink bottled water here don't usually do it because they think it's "better" than tap water, it's either because of convenience when you're not home or because they like carbonated water (which is very popular in Germany).
I wonder if all the articles talking about the prevalence of microplastics, are in actuality demonstrating the safety of microplastics. If it is in 93% of bottled water, and bottled water is used by millions of people (according to https://www.consumerreports.org/bottled-water/should-we-brea... around 110 Million people in the US avoid drinking tap water), then there has been widespread exposure to microplastics. It…
There was a WHO study published just last month[0] which did not find any dangers associated with microplastics in drinking water. One of the conclusions mirrors your reasoning: "Although it is not possible to draw any firm conclusion on toxicity related to the physical hazard of plastic particles, particularly the nano size particles through drinking-water exposure, no reliable information suggests it is a concern.…