With the exception of the beginning of the recession (2008 and 2009), bottled water sales have grown every year for the past four decades. The International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) recorded an average annual bottled water consumption of 1.6 gallons per person in 1976, which grew to 21 times that by 2014 – that’s 10.9 billion gallons or 34.2 gallons per person.

Beverage industry experts believe the recent growth that contributed to the surpassing of soda sales is due in part to consumers’ increasing awareness of and concern for the health impacts sugary beverages have, as well as more frequent discoveries of lead-contaminated drinking water.

Plastic Bottles Can Take up to 1,000 Years to Decompose

Different types of plastic have different decomposition periods. The average length of time it takes for a plastic bottle to decompose in a landfill is 450 years, however, it can take some types of plastic up to 1,000 years to fully biodegrade. When you consider that 90% of plastic bottles aren’t even recycled in addition to bottles made out of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET or PETE), which never biodegrade, it really makes you think twice about buying bottled water.

Other reasons plastic bottles are bad for the environment and you:

• Approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil are used annually to make plastic bottles, and even more oil is used to ship them.
• The EPA has stricter standards for tap water than the FDA does for bottled water, so the water you’re drinking could contain more contaminants than what you’d get from your tap.
• According to 2013 data from the IBWA, the average cost of bottled water per gallon (not including imported and sparkling waters) was $1.21. This was 600 times more expensive than tap water at $2.00 per every thousand gallons, according to the EPA. This includes “bottled” water that gets delivered to office buildings in jugs. Excluding this, consumers pay 3,785 times the cost of a gallon of tap water for a gallon of bottled water, which comes to $7.57 per gallon.

Choose Kinetico K5 Drinking Water Systems Over Bottled Water

Not only does using water from a Kinetico water filtering system keep plastic out of the landfill and save you a lot of money, it gives your purer water than almost any bottled water you could buy.

The Kinetico K5 drinking water system removes 99% of contaminants, which is more than any other drinking water system. Some of the contaminants the K5 removes are:

There are lots of reasons to purchase Kinetico water filtering systems. You can read more about our home water softener system on our website, or you can contact Clearwater Systems at 1-888-928-3710 to discuss getting clean drinking water in your home.