Is bottled water safer than tap water?Updated 19 days ago

Sometimes it's safer to drink bottled water than unfiltered tap water. However, it's much safer to drink filtered tap water than bottled water.

Tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a packaged food product. The FDA’s bottled water standards are generally based on the EPA’s drinking water standards, but bottled water plants are usually inspected less often, and bottled water companies aren’t required to provide the same public quality reports that municipal water systems must issue.

Furthermore, it's not uncommon for the FDA to flag the presence of contaminants like PFAS in bottled water, albeit in levels below the EPA's regulatory limit. Additionally, because bottled water is stored in—well, a plastic bottle—it's more likely to accumulate microplastics. Studies show that the average liter of bottled water contains 240,000 microplastics.

That's why we say bottled water may be safer than unfiltered tap water, but filtered tap water remains the safest way to stay hydrated.

That's not to mention the heavy environmental and financial cost of bottled water. On a per-gallon basis, it's much cheaper to drink water filtered by the Hydroviv Under Sink Filter versus bottled water.

On a final and perhaps surprising note, most bottled water is actually just re-packaged tap water!