Bottled water is one of my favorites thing to pick on here, because Coca Cola (Dasani) figured out people value tasteless water and most tap water actually has a tase to it. Run that tap water thru a Brita filter pitcher and you end up with Dasani without the label.. Put either in a glass and they’re indistinguishable, but some people place 10x or more value on bottled over filtered tap. The plastic bottle and label are the only difference.
Agree completely. At least here in the US. I do work in the municipal water supply industry. Most bottled water suppliers -might- run their water through a cartridge filter, or perhaps a media filter, but there is little if anything to filter out by the time it hits the distribution pipes.
We did actually have a small bottled water operation in Vietnam, marketing a locally produced, US branded water. We ran tap water through an RO unit, and bottled it. But the difference there, is that for the most part, you can't (or at least shouldn't) drink the tap water. The major rivers that supply most of the municipal water are so polluted that conventional treatment plants can't remove things like elevated dissolved organics, nitrates and ammonia - basically the byproducts of decomposing sewage. Most municipalities that provide water service, treat the distribution system water with conventional plants, and run a side operation using RO to produce drinkable bottled water. The distribution water can be used for bathing, washing cookware and foods, brushing teeth, etc. but it just shouldn't be drank.
Here in the US those water sources would be deemed unsuitable for potable water use, and if they had to be used, they would be run through perhaps a coagulated ultrafiltration process and maybe ion exchange, after chemically nitrifying any ammonia present otherwise.
We had a contract with an Australian governmental agency providing clean drinking water to impoverished countries to build and distribute several containerized treatment plants in rural Vietnam using a two stage ultrafiltration process. These units were semi-portable, and were contained in 20 foot shipping containers. They were relatively simple to operate, and could utilized polluted water sources to provide drinking water for villages that had no other access to clean water. Several Vietnamese municipal water agencies were interested in the process, and two cities funded some pilot testing, using one of our prototype units. Drawing water out of the Red River (North, near Hanoi) we were able to barely meet existing potable water standards, and in the other not quite. But we couldn't come close to US standards. That would have required RO, which is prohibitively expensive to do on a municipal level.
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