The one I got was defective; when I wrote them to say I couldn’t get any water out of the darn thing, they immediately said they’d send me a new one free. So, points on customer service.

Unfortunately, the cap and interior filter assembly are made of plastic – they are labeled PP 5 (polypropylene) which I understand from reading the National Geographic Green Guide is one of the plastics that is not known (so far) to leach toxic chemicals. Have you heard anything to the contrary on that?

Meanwhile, though, every effort I made to get water out of my defective bottle *tasted* like plastic. Gross. It’s hard to for me to imagine that something that leaches plastic *taste* doesn’t leach plastic *chemicals*, you know what I mean? I’m hoping the non-defective version will be better.

So, what to do? Just try really hard to remember to bring the filtered water from home. If you don’t have it, and you’re desperate, you have to do what you have to do. But remember a few things:

1) Bottled water is not as regulated as tap water, so there’s no guarantee that what you’re drinking from that bottle is any better.

2) When we all resort to bottled water and give up on the tap, the bottled water companies win. What we need to be doing is agitating for better municipal water! We can’t let our water infrastructure crumble and give in to corporate privatization of our water supplies.

3) There are reusable water bottles with built in water filters. Maybe you could carry one and use the removable filter when you’ve forgotten to bring your own filtered water. Here’s one company I know about: https://www.ecousable.com/store/store.php/categories/filtered_water_bottles_-_25_oz I’m not endorsing this brand because I haven’t tried it myself, and there are a lot of other filtered water bottles on the market now. Google is your friend. Just search on “stainless steel filter water bottle”. Hope this helps!

tag line: “Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won’t sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?”

http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle

My community, just north of Chicago, sucks in Lake Michigan water, just as Chicago does, for tap water. Inland communities can buy it from those of us lucky enough to sit on the lake.

Chicago is charging $2.01 per 1,000 gallons to those who want to buy. That kinda puts the price of a bottle of water in perspective, doesn’t it? But my community offers a better deal to our neighbor communities of <94 cents per 1,000 gallons.

As for the bags, the grocery stores are pushing reusable bags now – proof that the plastic bag is on the defensive.