By Barbara Kessler

It’s no secret Americans are suckers for convenience. Consider how we’re losing the ability to make our own coffee. Or the fact that there are 2.8 cup holders per passenger in U.S.-made cars.

Of course what we’re putting in those cup holders may prove to be the most successful of convenience gambits, the plastic bottle of water. Once we got water from wells and then the tap; now we have factories bottle it up, package it, truck it around and then sell it to us. But you know that story.

Here’s a new one: That clear plastic marvel of modern marketing probably contains nothing much more than plain old tap water from somewhere that may or may not have been filtered as well as the water you could get from your own tap.

At the risk of sounding like Joe Biden, let’s say that again: It may or may not have been filtered as well as your own tap water.

That’s the gist of findings by the Environmental Working Group, which decided to look behind the “image of purity” promoted by bottled water sellers by lab testing water samples from ten common brands of bottled water.

[Read more →]