Is bottled water really a good idea? Maybe not if you examine the facts. Here are 10 very surprising statistics.

1. Long Island’s tap water undergoes far more testing and is far more regulated than bottled water.
2. The NRDC conducted a comprehensive four-year scientific study of 1,000 brands of bottled water. The results showed that one third of the bottled waters violated their own industry standards for water quality.
3. Plastic water bottles can take between 400 and 1,000 years to decompose. So if William the Conqueror used plastic bottles, they would probably be gone by now. Probably.
4. Only 20% of all plastic bottles are recycled…in a good year.
5. Americans alone consume nearly 9 billion gallons of bottled water annually. That’s how many billions of bottles?
6. On Long Island, bottled water can cost anywhere from 250 times to a thousand times as much as tap water.
7. Last year, the average American used 167 water bottles, but only recycled 38. So chances are, there’s 129 bottles for each of us in a landfill or on the sides of roads.
8. In many taste tests, Long Island’s tap water was preferred over bottled water.
9. It requires 3X the amount of water to produce a plastic bottle as it does to fill the bottle.
10. It takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce plastic bottles yearly. This could fuel 1 million cars for a year.