Sunday, December 26, 2010

The Differences In Tap Water Vs Filtered Water

By Adriana Noton


Given that humans, along with all other organisms, are largely made of water and need to drink significant amounts every day in order to remain healthy, the answer to the question of the healthiest type is of utmost importance. One of the questions raised is about the safety of tap water vs filtered water, the answer to which has been quite confused by marketing campaigns and other media trying to sell their point of view.

Marketing campaigns are not all bad. Thanks to them, many people have learned in the recent past that bottled drinks are bad for the environment. All those bottles require oil to produce the plastic they are made out of, and most bottles are not recycled but instead sit in landfills for the many years required for plastic to biodegrade. Even those that are recycled require energy to be turned into new products. So, environmentally speaking, bottled is not the best choice.

Something that people don't know a lot of the time is that federal guidelines for the safety of bottled water and tap water are not the same. Tap is held to much stricter standards, and testing is required much less often for bottled. Even tests for things such as bacteria, toxic chemicals and heavy metals are required less often in bottled than in tap.

A United States-based study have proven that some bottled brands have unsafe levels of contaminants. The study can only be expected to show the picture at that point in time, and thus means that all bottled brands need to be looked at with suspicion as potentially dangerous. The conclusion reached is that bottled is definitely not always safer than tap.

Those who are convinced of the ecological dangers of bottled but not of the safety of tap can make a third choice. Purchasing their own filtration device can alleviate concerns by additionally purifying their tap. Companies can be contracted to deliver purified water in large, refillable containers, but in home devices are definitely superior from a monetary standpoint.

A lot of the bottled water sold is not actually from a spring or other idyllic source. Instead, most is additionally refined and purified tap. If you know this and the fact that bottles are very ecologically unsound, then in-home filtration systems make the most sense. The liquid from one is almost the same as that in many types of bottled.

Using an in-home filtration system will allow you to get the best of both worlds-- the tap that you purify will be held to the high municipal standards required by the overseeing agency, but your purification device will remove any remaining contaminants. If you do not wish to drink the chlorine, chloramine or fluoride in tap, using a purification device can remove it.

There is not one answer to the question of tap water vs filtered water. Bottled is a universally negative choice in terms of the benefits achieved versus the costs accrued, but either straight tap or purified tap can be a good choice. Additional purification is not seen as necessary for those who live in the US, however, by most experts.




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