Why should you use reusable water bottles?

The reputation of bottled water is lying bleeding in the gutter, which probably isn't a bad thing.

While the product certainly does have its place, disposable plastic water bottles have become a blight on the planet due to the levels of consumption of bottled water products.

The plastic in disposable water bottles http://wiki.answers.com/articles/187/1/Recycling-by-the-numbers.html, but where there is no deposit system such as we have in South Australia, the majority of the bottles wind up in landfill.

According to statistics from the International Bottled Water Association, in 2000 Americans consumed 4.7 billion gallons of bottled water, which represented less than 9 percent of total beverage consumption. By 2008 bottled water consumption increased to almost 8.7 billion gallons.

However, after the bad press bottled water received regarding plastic waste and water quality a couple of years back, an interesting thing took place.

In 2007, Americans were drinking on average 29.0 gallons of bottled water a year; a 5.3% increase on the previous year. In 2008, that had dropped to 28.5 gallons; a drop of 1.8% and the first drop in over a decade.

The International Bottled Water Association acknowledges that environmental concerns may have played a role in the drop.

People didn't stop drinking water, so what happened?

Refillable water bottles did.

Aside from the environmental benefits of using a refillable water bottle, I ran some quick calculations for my article "http://wiki.answers.com/blogs/459/Is-water-too-cheap.htmlwater too cheap?" and found that the water we get from our taps here in Australia costs about USD 0.4 cents per gallon. I have only ever bought one bottle of water a few months back and that quart cost a few bucks!

With the addition of a home water filter, you can have water as good, if not better than many bottled water brands - as some of the bottled water brands pull their water directly from municipal supplies and at times don't even bother filtering it.