Bottled water does get scrutinized more than all other beverages and products packaged in plastic but bottled water should get singled out simply based on the fact you can’t go to your kitchen faucet and get soda or lotion to pour out of your tap.

Plastic Bottle Facts:

• Visualize the average energy cost to make a plastic bottle, process and fill the bottle, transport the bottled water to market and then deal with the waste: It would be like filling up a quarter of every bottle with oil.
• Bottle water costs about 1000 times more than tap water.
• 40% of bottled water starts as tap water.
• 86% of plastic water bottles used in the U.S. end up in landfills, where they will take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.
• 47 million gallons of oil is consumed to produce the bottles that Americans drink out of each year. This is enough oil to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1-billon pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
• The federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water.
• The energy we waste using bottled water would be enough to power 190,000 homes. But refilling your water bottle from the tap requires no expenditure of energy, and zero waste of resources.
• Bottled water is often not of high water quality.
• In a study conducted by the National Resources Defense Council one third of bottled water tested contained significant contamination.
• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) do not regulate 60-70 percent of bottled water.
• For the 30-40 percent it does regulate, the FDA only requires companies to test a sample of water once per week.
• The EPA requires testing of municipal water systems between 300-480 times per month
• The shipment of bottled water burns massive quantities of fossil fuel, a weekly convoy of 37,000 18- wheelers.
• The incineration of the plastic bottles releases toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash laden with heavy metals into the air.
• Approximately 18 million barrels of crude oil equivalent were consumed in 2005 to replace the 2 million tons of PET bottles that were wasted instead of recycled.
• The world's annual consumption of plastic materials has increased from around 5 million tons in the 1950s to nearly 100 million tons today.

(Source: EPA, Container Recycling Institute, PBS Point of View 2004, National Resources Defense Council, SierraClub.org, Foodandwaterwatch.org and Recyclenow.com.)