Tap water costs 0.002 per gallon. If you filter it, the cost is about 0.25 gallon. Bottle water is about $10.66 gallon. Cost wise, giving it up is a no-brainer. If you are worried about drinking your tap water, test it. If it needs filtration, buy the proper filter.

You can get complete details on how to test your water and get the correct filter by reading Take Back the Tap Guide to Home Tap Water Filtration.

Why is rainwater harvesting on my mind? I’ve been sitting in Northern California being battered by one rain storm after another. I’m watching all that water run down the hills. Of course, the rainwater here will recharge the underground aquifer that I pump my water out of. But people who don’t have a good aquifer for a well, or who live in a city and want to stop using city water, can set up a rainwater harvesting system. Most people think about using rainwater for landscaping. But you can also use it for drinking. Check out the video to find out how one couple is using rainwater for drinking. if you want more information, see http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/

This machine looks pretty sophisticated, doesn’t it? If you are a do-it-yourself person, you can make a less-elegant version in two days. Or so claims a person in Oakland. Check out this implementation of a pedal-powered washer on Graywater Action. It’s made from a 55 gallon drum and other scrap materials.

The New York Times recently published an article stating that “More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, …”

See Millions in U.S. Drink Dirty Water, Records Show.

When you live in a city it seems reasonable to rely on water department officials to test and maintain the quality of your water. So it’s disheartening to read that 1 out of 5 US treatment systems are out of compliance. It is especially disturbing because water contaminants contribute to illness. The Times says contaminants are “linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.”

I have my own well, so it’s up to me to get it tested. You can test a municipal water supply too if you want to make sure your water company is doing its job. The process requires you to send off a quart of water to a testing lab. It costs from $100 to $250 depending on the suite of tests you require. If you are in a city, you might organize your neighbors to contribute. If you are concerned at all about water quality, it’s worth the money.

Control Laboratories is one facility that tests water. You can find many others by searching on the Internet.

That’s the first sentence on the back label of Green Planet water. Where are bottles ending up? I took these photos a few weeks ago, when I was hiking in the rainforest of Panama, near Gamboa.

How many reusable water bottles do you find on the ground? I’ve never found any. People tend to hang onto those. Bottled water promotes carelessness. No message on any bottle will change that.

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Yes, these look like they are soda bottles. The issue is the same for soda (colored, sweetened tap water) as it is for plain bottled water and carbonated bottled water.

No.

Yet the marketeers of bottled water companies are working hard to convince you that drinking it actually helps the environment. Save your money and don’t fall for it.

Green Planet is one of the more recent bottled water vendors on the market. I’ll analyze the hype on the bottle:

Green Planet: The environmentally friendly bottle.
Digital Rabbit: It burns great because it was made from plants, not oil. They still have to use up energy to fabricate the bottle, make the inks, and so on. The most environmentally friendly container is a reusable one, like a glass.

Green Planet: Quench your thirst and your desire to help the environment.
Digital Rabbit: You can just as easily quench your thirst by turning on your own tap. Then take the money your were going to spend on the bottled water and donate it to a true environmental cause.

Green Planet: Pure Handcrafted Water.
Digital Rabbit: What does that mean? Did someone take hydrogen and mix it with oxygen? I think not. This is pure B.S. I described my water system a few days ago. There is nothing to “handcrafted water.” Turn on the pump, extract the water from the ground. It probably doesn’t even need treatment.

Green Planet: By choosing our water you’re helping reduce global warming, carbon emissions and our dependency on oil.
Digital Rabbit: Pure B.S. You are actually contributing to global climate change and increasing dependency on oil. The bottle takes energy to manufacture. The bottled water takes gasoline to transport. (Water is heavy, too.) Manufacturing and transportation emit carbon.

My advice. Drink tap water.

There are many things that upset the water balance, like irrigating dry areas for crops. But bottled water is one completely avoidable imbalance. It’s a waste of energy. It’s a waste of money. It’s unfair to the local communities that rely on the water table.

Let’s take a look at a balanced water system and then see how to imbalance it with bottled water. I’ll use my water system (which I described yesterday) as an example.

First take a look at the soil and ground water layers in this USGS diagram. The “unsaturated zone” has small empty spaces between the grains of dirt that are filled with air or water. But because it’s all mixed in together, it is impossible to pump any water out. Plants do a pretty good job extracting water from this layer with their roots.

If you go down deep enough, you arrive at the saturated zone where water dominates. I actually have two wells on my property. One is an Artesian well, where the ground water is really near the surface. It’s not trapped below like what you see in the diagram. The other well is tapping into ground water similar to what you see in the image.

The ground water gets refilled by water seeping down through the layers, although in some cases there could be an underground river recharging the ground water. In a dry place like parts of Texas, it could take centuries to refill. In wet areas, like the Panama canal zone that I just visited, ground water will get replenished fast. I have no idea how long it takes for my ground water to replenish.

Not all rainwater makes it back to the groundwater layer. As you might imagine, evaporation and plants use up a bit.

After I extract the water from the ground, it either gets drunk, used to wash something (dishes or me or laundry), or flushes a toilet. Used water goes into a septic tank or directly on the ground. In either case, it ends up seeping into the ground and some of it will end up recharging the ground water. The main point is that this is a balanced system. Whatever I takes stays right on the property.

If I were an entrepreneur, I might look at my 10,000 gallon water tank as a money maker. That comes out to 40,000 16 oz bottles. At a conservative $1 a bottle, even if costs were 0.50 to produce, I can make $20,000 a tank. I’m told that the flow rate from my groundwater is pretty good. I haven’t done the math, but I do know I can pump quite a bit of water, quite fast out of the ground in my area. Pure, clean, mountain water.

What would happen if I did that?

As soon as the water gets transported off property, I lose that amazing balanced system I had going. What’s more, I’m using gasoline to bring the water to someone who is too lazy to fill their own reusable bottle. I’m also sucking down the same groundwater that my neighbors are tapping into. Oh yeah, then there is the energy I have to expend to fabricate the bottles, the gasoline to bring them to my bottling plant, and the inevitable waste the bottle creates.

That’s my water tank. When I moved out here from the city, I had no idea how a water system worked. Then one day a contractor hit a water pipe and I had to get on the fast track to learn how to take down, and then bring up, an entire water system. With that knowledge, I can say that I’m head of my own private water department. I think it’s helpful to understand how water systems, and the water in general, work when trying to come to grips with issues like bottled water and industrial uses of water.

Here’s how a private water system works . . . .

Elsewhere on the property—far from this tank— there is an underground water pump that takes water from the water table (300 feet below) and fills this gigantic tank. There is a floating switch in the tank that turns on the underground pump whenever the level in the tank lowers to a certain point. (I think it’s around 8,000 gallons.)

I got water, but the problem is how to get it out of the tank. There is a giant outlet at the bottom. I doubt I could turn it, but if I did, the pressure of all that water would cause it to burst out. That outlet is reserved for the Fire Department. There is actually a hookup for a fire hose. One reason for this quantity of water in the tank is for fire fighting.

The water tank has to serve 12 outdoor taps scattered on the property and a few outbuildings. The pressure in the tank is not enough to push the water throughout the property, so that brings me to pump number 2.

There is another pump, in a pump house, that is connected to a pressurization tank. The pump automatically maintains the pressure in the pressurization tank so that it’s between 40 and 60 p.s.i. (pounds per square inch). It’s the pressure in this tank that causes water to flow from each tap smoothly. It all works great unless there is a power failure. Without power to the pressure pump, water won’t flow.

Water treatment? Not much really. The water comes from 300 feet below the earth to the water tank. On it’s way to a tap, the water travels through a “whole-house” filter. The cold water for the kitchen tap first goes through an under-the-sink filtration system.

The result — delicious, safe, pure water.

Bottled water companies like to claim how environmentally responsible they are by using recyclable bottles, using thinner plastic, reclaiming water used in processing, and so on. (See How Can Bottled Water Be Green?) So think about the following the next time your are compelled to purchase bottled water:

After Nestle rolled into McCloud, California to extract water (they have a 100 year contract), 250-300 trucks per day started rolling into town (24/7/365), McCloud has noise and air pollution now that they never had before. When you drink bottled water, think of McCloud. If the water in the bottle isn’t coming from McCloud, it’s coming from some other small town’s aquifer—like Chaffee County, Colorado or Fryeburg, Maine or Mecosta County, Michigan.

Why don’t you just buy a water bottle, fill it with water from your own tap, and carry that bottle with you? Then you can drink up and know that you are not causing grief for some small town.

See: Stop Nestle’s Waters.

Can you imagine swimming in or drinking the water in the photo? Newtown Creek is in the USA—New York to be exact. Riverkeeper is fighting to get the pollution cleaned up and further pollution stopped. They say:

“In 2004, Riverkeeper filed a federal lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corporation for its failure to stop the pollution of Greenpoint, Brooklyn and Newtown Creek caused by a historic, 17 million gallon oil spill which resulted in a plume of contaminated groundwater under Greenpoint and Newtown Creek.

Residents of the area have some of the highest rates of asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema in the city. Riverkeeper’s efforts have brought the matter not only into the courts, but to the attention of the government, which owes its citizens the basic right of clean air and water.”

If you live near the creek, you can help patrol. If not, you can take other action. Visit their website.