Bottle your own water at home

I recently heard on National Public Radio that Americans buy more than 500 million bottles of bottled water every week. Every week.

Furthermore, 24 percent of the bottled water we buy is tap water, which is filtered and repackaged by Pepsi (Aquafina) and Coke (Dasani). To get this water, which is very heavy, from the bottling factories to our supermarkets, it has to be trucked around the country.

If it's from France (or Fiji, for God sakes), it goes by ship, too.

When I first heard the 500-million-bottle figure, I thought it was pretty unbelievable. But I've looked it up, it seems to be true, and I thought, boy, we've all fallen for something that is not quite as harmless or as healthy as it seems. The more I thought about it, the more the whole industry seems to be an utter waste of resources.

The final kick in the head is that plastic bottles are usually made of polyethelene terephthalate, which in America alone requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually — enough to fuel about 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.

I wouldn't propose never ever drinking bottled water. There's always the question of whether we're choosing water over Diet Coke, which certainly is a healthier choice, or water over tap water, which is probably a tie.

But for the times when we're choosing tap water over bottled water, there is a way to lessen the damage, and that is to purify and carry our own water from home.

For whatever it's worth, six months ago I bought a filter at the Wellness Education Center in Whitefish. It cost about $90, has 10 different filters and eliminates every conceivable taste and negativity.

I connected it to my faucet in about three minutes, and I'm sure it's already paid for itself just by me filling few canteens before I leave the house each morning. (If you're going to do this, too, then try not to refill old plastic water bottles; they're not designed for reuse and reportedly can leach chemicals into your water.)

I think I personally just became so used to seeing plastic bottles in stores that I'd stopped asking myself where they all come from or, probably worse yet, where they all go.

I fell for the big marketing and the minor convenience. If you have, too, then maybe try bottling your own water from home. It really has been almost no sacrifice for me, and I definitely have noticed that our garage recycling piles are smaller.

Linda Woods Young lives in Whitefish.