Bottled water is for losers. That's other than those who buy it for logically defensible reasons, namely:
• being outdoors, and in preference to fizzy drinks
• preferring sparkling water
• running in a marathon
• that other logically defensible reason I forget
But if you can't get through a day without grabbing a bottle of H2O to keep you 'hydrated', then you are officially a mug, and somewhere a shareholder is very pleased.
There's no need to buy bottled water if a tap dispensing drinking water is at hand. You might think there is, if you believe the taste of tap water is tainted by fluorides and chlorates and whatever, but that simply means you've swallowed some marketing myths and are more gullible than you look. Apparently 57% of UK bottled water is consumed at home, which is madness, lugging home liquid you could source perfectly easily (and hugely cheaper) from a tap. Obviously it's your right to throw away your hard-earned cash in this way if you so choose, but quite frankly you're flushing your money down the drain.
Only 13% of bottled water is "carried out", while 30% is drunk "out of home", for example in restaurants or the workplace. I always think that capitulating to bottled water in a restaurant is a sign of weak character, rather than having the bottle to stand up for tap. In a cafe bottled water might be the healthiest drink going, so maybe isn't too bad, although I'd always rather pimp up my water with a boiling teabag. As for clutching bottled water in the workplace, perhaps to get you through a meeting or as a deskside companion, for goodness sake use the drinking water provided you mindless wastrel.
According to www.britishbottledwater.org, a marketing mouthpiece for the British bottled water industry...
• we drink five times as much tea as bottled water, although the gap between the two beverages is closing (they seem pleased about the latter)
• annual bottled water consumption currently stands at 39 litres per person (considerably less than the European average of 115 litres per person)
• sparkling water's share of the market has more than halved since 1998, now accounting for only around 15%
• bottled water typically retails at up to 500 times more than the price of tap water
Actually they didn't mention the last of those facts, it's the elephant in the room, given that water now sells for more than milk, even oil, in many cases. But that doesn't stop drinks companies from selling their overpriced liquid to an audience of naive hydration disciples, and raking in profits by the gallon. Indeed, these greedy corporations are precisely the sort of vacuous marketing behemoths who would sponsor a tube station...
