When bottled water was first sold in the 1970s, the concept was met with ridicule. How preposterous it was that people would buy water roughly 2,000 times the price of water from your faucet. Indeed, buying bottled water seemed akin to purchasing bottled air. But marketing dollars touting bottled water’s perceived convenience, combined with scare-tactic advertisements both highlighting and vilifying tap water’s possible harmful contaminants led Americans to guzzle almost 60 billion single-serve bottles of water in 2006 alone. 
This is a huge problem not only due to the immense amounts of fuel used to produce, ship, and distribute the bottles, but the shrapnel from this unscrupulous consumption has pockmarked our planet with behemoth landfills and massive floating islands of garbage in our oceans.
It’s true that in many areas of the United States—especially in rural towns with minimal funds to enforce water regulations—water from the faucet can certainly be contaminated with impurities. But with increasing attainability and cheapness of attachable filtration mechanisms, there is little excuse to buy bottled water at all. Plus, tap water is often more regulated then bottled water.
Faucet Face, a company dedicated to encourage consumers to return to public water sources, manufactures aesthetically pleasing, reusable glass bottles in order to spark and fuel a dialogue about water conservation. “We’ve got great illustrators for each design, and we make high-quality bottles to appeal to people’s aesthetic values. We’re using that as an entry to start people talking about water issues as a whole—trying to make this beautiful object that is eye-catching and gets a dialogue going,” Faucet Face founder Mason Gentry explains in an interview with Organic Connections. “The idea is that you walk out during your lunch hour and you have your ‘Tap is Terrific’ bottle, and it starts the conversation about tap water and the wastefulness of bottled water.”
What’s more, Faucet Face bottles have been tested to ensure they are devoid of BPA and lead and cadmium leaching.
Read more in Organic Connections.
