Here's a cheap chic idea: Instead of buying bottled water, consider buying a water filter system such as Brita or Pur, or buying one of those ceramic crocks that come with refillable 5-gallon jugs that you can fill up with reverse osmosis water, and fill up your own easy-to-carry container (glass or stainless steel is best) before you head out the door.
Bottled water does a lot of harm to the environment. The process of bottling water produces up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste every year. That plastic requires up to 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce, and since only 20% end up being recycled, tons of slow-decaying plastic trash are continually building up in landfills and in the world's oceans, representing a great risk to marine life.
That's not all though. It hurts your wallet as well. Unless you're out in the middle of nowhere and the only convenience store for miles around has nothing else but bottled water, buying bottled water is stuuuuuuuupid.
We think paying $1.30 for a mid-size bottle of water is pretty exorbitant. Even if it comes from Fiji or some fjord in some pristine far-flung area of Europe, it's still water. It can't taste that different from regular water.
Although we're sure there's nothing intrinsically wrong with tap water, over the years, we've taken the extra precaution of using a Brita water filter pitcher, just in case. It's worked pretty well for us, except for the fact that we get lazy every now and then about filling it back up again. There's that whole issue of opening and closing the fridge quite a lot as well.
So we decided to buy a ceramic water crock for $30, and a 5-gallon jug of reverse osmosis-purified water for 25 cents per gallon. The lady that sold us the jug n' crock set let us have our first 5 gallons for free, and gave us a stamp-as-you-go card so that we could get our 10th refill gratis as well.
Not having to continuously open and close the fridge door is great, but the best part of it all is the savings. Consider this: $1.25 for a 20-oz. bottle of water versus $1.25 for 5 gallons of filtered water. 'Nuff said!
