Bottled Water: More Harm Than Good Essay

Jesse Nichols
Liza Wilcox
Eng102-13
1/31/2012
Assignment #1: Argumentative Essay
Bottled Water: More Harm than Good
Water, one of the most essential things to life, has now become a product that companies can bottle and sell to consumers. These companies claim that bottled water has benefits that tap water does not. Do these companies discuss how much waste is produced or how good America’s tap water already is? There may be some benefits to drinking water from a bottle, but the costs are too much to continue supporting it.
The out of pocket cost of drinking bottled water for the recommended 8 glasses a day would shock the average person. It doesn’t seem like you are spending a lot on bottled water from day to day. However, you could spend up to $1,400 yearly on bottled water. This seems a little excessive, especially when the same amount of tap water would only cost you 49 cents (“Praise Tap Water”2).   You can make the decision if buying bottled water is really cost effective.
The environment is important to everyone; and everyone wants to do their part in protecting it. By using bottled water you are actually doing your part in destroying it. Even though the plastic in bottled water is recyclable, only about 23 percent of it is actually recycled. That is 77 percent of bottles going into landfills and sitting there (“Praise Tap Water” 3). The use of bottled water is filling our landfills and adding to the problem of how to deal with our waste. It also takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the water bottles used in America. That is enough oil to fuel 100,000 cars a year (“Praise Tap Water” 3). It scares me how much fossil fuel is wasted on a product that simply holds water. I will let you decide if that is a good use of oil.
The claimed purity of bottled water is a factor for people being in support of it. But, according to a study published in The Archives of Family Medicine   researchers found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water...