Abandoning bottled water for plain old tap

One of the glories of this country has been the municipal water system. Go anywhere, turn on the tap and out comes clear, fresh drinking water. That's not true in large parts of the world as unwary tourists frequently learn to their dismay.But going to the kitchen for a glass of water has become too simple, too plebian for many of us. We turned to pricy bottled water, sometimes fancied up with flavors and vitamins, and sometimes imported from countries whose own drinking water is suspect.The fad got a boost from the popular belief and fairly arbitrary standard that humans need to consume eight, 8-ounce glasses of water a day to stay hydrated, a word that has entered the popular vocabulary. The result was that Americans took to lugging water everywhere with them, as if going to and from work was like a parched crossing of a hostile desert.It appears that common sense and tap water are making a comeback, according to the Associated Press. which says that the soft -- the AP's term is "lousy" -- economy is doing what the environmentalists could not -- get people off disposable plastic bottles of water.The AP calculated that at standard rates of consumption, Costco's cheapest bottled water would cost the user over $400 a year. More expensive brands run into the thousands of dollars over a year. That's kind of expensive when the American Water Works Association says drinking the same amount of tap water costs 51 cents a year.Various do-gooders are urging people to fill reusable bottles out of the tap. It makes sense and who's going to know? One thing about drinking water is that it all looks alike.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)