Indoors, Outdoors, and In Your Neighborhood

Is it safe to drink tap water or should I choose bottled water instead?

The water from your home faucets is pumped from below-ground aquifers or area reservoirs. It is highly treated, tested and monitored according to federal safety standards, and piped directly to your home for pennies a gallon.

In contrast, bottled water is often just repackaged tap water with a much higher price tag. Its environmental and energy cost is high too. The plastic bottle requires drilling for oil, shipping the oil to a port, trucking it to a refinery, manufacturing the bottle, and shipping it to stores. Then you use more energy driving to your local market to buy it and refrigerating it at home. Only a fraction of plastic bottles will be recycled; most wind up in landfills or end up adding to the plastic pollution problem in our bays or the ocean where they will break down into tiny pieces known as microplastics that are ingested by seabirds, turtles, dolphins and manatees.

Calculate Your Water Footprint