On Sunday night 12-04-2009, 60 minutes ran a story about the bottled water industry along the line of liquid gold.

The nuts and bolts of it all was that most bottled water that you buy really is simply filtered tap water and when purchased in smaller bottles is more expensive than petrol.

When you consider that the only production cost for the water it’s self is simply running the mains water through a water filter system and bottling it, the profit margins are simply huge, they did example testing with people that normally buy bottled water and gave then filtered tap water to taste, result was that they preferred the filtered water, this is no real surprise as the freshly filtered water was just that, fresh with the bottled water having sat in a plastic bottle for some time.

They also had some of the bottled water tested and some were found to have high levels of bacteria with some also containing aluminium.

The reality is it is hugely cheaper to have a home water filter system and filter it fresh, if you need a small bottle of water then it is as easy as re-filling one of the pop top bottles.

One of the problems with tap water is the chlorine as it is un-pleasant, this product is easily removed with a carbon based water filter system or reverse osmosis.