Granted it’s not going to make you sick, tap water is more convenient and often times has less of a taste than the most popular bottled water. It is 2025 we should all be able to simply turn our faucets on and get a glass of GOOD water and not play all these games and waste resources transporting it all so if you’re lucky enough to have decent tap water i’m jealous!
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highly depends on where you live.
Flint Michigan would like a word with you
Mine is foul and does make me sick.
In what world is this unpopular lol
Unfortunately, not everyone lives in Madrid.
I mean yes in places where it’s not going to make you sick, then yes it’s better to just use tap water.
I live in the midwest (No not Flint lol) and have lead in my tap water
This depends on where you are, like everyone drinks tap water where I live but in some countries it’s literally undrinkable. This doesn’t work as a blanket or even average statement.
City tap water tastes like crap; country well water is THE BEST!
If you live in a country with good water treatment etc go for it!
Having good tap water is very much taken for granted and underappreciated. Until there is a problem.
Yes, and there is a paradox.
People in countries without clean running water see it as a luxury, while people who have it see bottled water as a luxury
“Should” carrying a lot of weight here. I drink tap water because it’s clean where I live. That hasn’t been the case my whole life and it’s not everyone’s case.
Tap water is not a source. It is a product
Bull Run water shed tap water ❤️
Tastes noticeably better out of the fridge with a filter than it does the sink. Rarely drink water bottles,but honestly, I do think they’re more pure tasting.
Well obviously. But depending on where you live that can make you sick and die. People don’t complain that their tap water shouldn’t be clean and healthy, they complain because it isn’t clean and healthy.
Being from Chicago, I’m pretty happy my my water
I live outside Detroit and the tapwater is great. Bonus, for now, it still has fluoride.
Not where I live. My tap water is literally poison.
Depends on where you live
I live away from town we have our own well with a pump, tap water is great. I do have to clean my water bottle more often because of the lack of chlorine in the water. I try drinking tap water in town and it tastes wrong, even sodas in larger cities taste wrong compared to the one in town here.
My tap water tastes like a swimming pool I’ll pass. I just have an office water cooler with an 18.9L jug I swap out at the grocery store for a few bucks. Cold, tasteless spring water whenever I want it.
WHY are a good chunk of the comments talking about how their water isn’t safe to drink when OP acknowledges that in their post 💀 does nobody read anymore?
Tap water has an acceptable level of human faeces.
And that’s where I stop
(Laughs in farm runoff well water)
It highly depends on where you live and the time of year. I’m in Texas, and every summer the city puts up ‘Boil Water’ notices for people who have city water. Luckily, I have a well so those don’t apply to me.
I grew up on tap water and never realized that a lot of the US doesn’t have that luxury. While at school for the military, I went to drink the tap water and couldn’t believe how disgusting it was (San Antonio, TX). I’ll never be ungrateful for the water I grew up on considering my experience. Everyone should be given the luxury of fresh tap.
Sure, so long as the government doesn’t intentionally fuck it up like they are planning too. Welcome to the worst timeline
In my part of the world, our tap water is ok… nothing bad would happen if you drink it…but we install RO/UV water purifiers at our homes anyway. It’s the first thing we generally do when we move into a new place.
So if you want to drink tap water regularly, just install a water purifier at home…you won’t have to keep buying bottled water.
Edit:
Also the amount of plastic waste generated by so many single use plastic bottles being used by millions of people would go down.
We do drink bottled water but in case we forget to take a bottle of water from home or for some reason cannot take it with us.
Well water FTW.
Too much chlorine and fluoride in ours. We just buy distilled water for drinking.
this is unpopular because most people on reddit live in a country where tap water isn’t properly regulated (america)
RFK jr enters chat
I love my r.o. System best purchase I ever made
If only our water reserve plant wasn’t next to a cemetery. It also has a lot of iron, way too much added chlorine and it sometimes leaves behind sand after you shower.
It’s like 90 percent of what I drink. Even when I go out to restaurants, I save a bit of money by asking for tap water as my drink, and they give it to you for free.
I prefer my water without all the chemicals
If I had my own house, I’d be able to get an RO filter and have some sort of filter on my faucet but I don’t, so tap water it is for now.
Seeing this question makes me think that its something where I and many others where I live take for granted because where I live and the municipality in specific has one of the best tap water in the world. All of Sweden in general has great tap water but some are worse due to taste of chemicals from the cleaning facility or minerals but to my limited experience that is quite rare.
Nice try, Mexico City tourism board.
Really just depends on where you live, where I live the tap water is great, one of the cleanest. But in Orange and Los Angeles County my roommates in college were health science majors and went to the water treatment plant and tap water down there is recycled sewer water, it’s purified and tests as technically the cleanest, but you can taste the difference and just getting your mind around that is kinda weird.
I live right by Lake Michigan and have great tap water that we can drink, but the filtered water through the fridge or bottled water definitely still taste better lol
Simply buy a reverse osmosis machine to make it better than any bottled water! Within 1 year (for 3 people in a household) it’ll pay for itself!
Extremely dependent on where you live. My tap water is perfectly safe but I prefer it through a filter. You’d be crazy to only drink bottled water at home if you’ve got good water to the house.
Tap water in my town is disgusting. It comes out almost white, and reeks. It’s nauseating. Water also regurlarly cuts off because of gor maintenance, and we often get notices to boil the water before consuming. So I buy spring water.
A lot of places have horrible tap water. Some older waterways are downright unsanitary. Happy your tap water is decent ; that makes you lucky.
I would argue that tap water is not a source, but the final destination.
We filter ours, but I agree
I live in the US and my tap water is unsafe. It has well over 13x the maximum recommended arsenic, lead, manganese and a few other shitty things.
It IS 2025 and we should all be able to simply turn our faucet on and get a glass of GOOD water, the problem is, I feel like in more than half of the US, that water tastes like complete ass. I tried to drink some out of my tap and I gagged. Some areas have great water from the tap, others don’t. I’d absolutely drink more tap water if it was possible, but sadly it’s not
Let’s not forget the approximately 42 million Americans who rely on a well for their water service. I have had a well for my water in two different places. About 35 years ago I had a well that provided clear cool water that was some of the best I have ever had. Where I live now our well is perfectly safe to drink but contains high levels of magnesium and iron giving it an unpleasant taste and odor. So for drinking water we use a water cooler, we use them well water for everything else. I do refill the water jugs myself at the grocery store.
When I started using a humidifier with tap water I noticed it created a fine white dust throughout my room. I now run it through a filter first.
west texas has entered the chat
I miss drinking tap water lol. “just get an RO system!” that’s the plan lol
If you’re at home or a restaurant, the tap water should be fine.
If I’m in a situation where I have to buy bottle water (e.g. after security at an airport) I’m looking for spring water. I’m not gonna pay Coca-Cola/Pepsi/Nestle for bottling their municipal tap water.
This person lives in a good water place. I refuse to buy water from any restaurant in my area that does not have a filter, I refuse to use the planet fitness or my high school water fountains for the same reason.
What about people who live on well water? High sulfur content, extremely hard water, etc. Even after filtering for bacteria, it is not good to drink.
I don’t want to drink fluoride, which I’ve said for years. But I am not given that choice if I want to drink my local tap water. Most developed nations removed water fluoridation years ago, but not the US. It’s asinine.
Fluoride is very effective… topically. That’s the mechanism of action. There’s zero reason to actually ingest it. It’s like drinking sunscreen, that’s not how it works. All the potential risks are systemic, and all the known benefits are from topical application.
Toothpaste is incredibly affordable and available and is almost all fluoridated, there’s no access issue to removing it from water.
Meanwhile the US Supreme Court has ruled that the Clean Water Act allows for sewage.
My house has a well and I get it tested every two years. It is delicious. My parents have municipal water supply and I thought it was good when I was growing up but now it just tastes like pool water. Too much chlorine.
When I visited family in Florida I noticed their water had a strong sulfur taste. I couldn’t drink it but they had no problem with it. I guess their taste buds are blind to that flavor.
People in Flint, Michigan probably have a different opinion on this. It’s hard to place trust in public water sources when we have evidence of officials treating infrastructure with a privatization mindset.
I used to not understand why people drink so much bottled water. But where I lived in MI, the water was especially good. We had well water that had a sweet, minerally taste. Bottled water was bland in comparison.
Then I moved to Philadelphia and quickly found out why so many people drink bottled water here. The water here tastes like dirt.
Yeah, really unpopular opinion.
Yeah, the water where I live is so good they bottle it and sell it. And some people locally still buy it despite it being the exact same water they’d literally get from their own tap. I’ll never understand how bottled water took off as a concept. Even when I lived where the water was shit, I didn’t drink bottled water, I just bought a Brita and filtered my tap water. I think I’ve bought bottled water out of desperation and poor planning twice in my entire life, and I felt like a chump for it, because it somehow consistently costs the same as almost every single other single-serve softdrink option, despite the other ones having, like, calories, and sometimes vitamins and shit. What is the justification for the cost of bottled water and why is anyone outside of, like, Flint, Michigan or something buying it on the regular? People are over-cautious (assuming tap water is dirty even when it’s not), too quick to spend money on things they can get for free, and also lazy (both physically and intellectually). The cost of the packaging and transport alone are ridiculous wastes of our collective resources, and the people mindlessly contributing to it should be ashamed of themselves and stop immediately. I don’t know if bottled water as it exists should even be a legal enterprise, it seems like such an obvious scam that I believe it should be heavily regulated and have price caps. There’s no justification for coke charging the same for plain water as they do for a soda. They didn’t do a god damned thing to the water. How is this not a scam?
i grew up with a community well and the water was excellent. at my grandparents house in the city the water tasted like chlorine and i wouldn’t drink it. first house i bought had excellent water again, then i moved and my new place has gross water so i drink from the filtered fridge dispenser. it’s been about 10 years since the last time i bought a bottle of water.
Tbh, I don’t like how most bottled water tastes. Unless it’s spring water, it just tastes off to me.
Tap water > bottled water most of the time imo.
Ehh. At least in my country using tap water to drink is standard and bottles would only be if you are on the go.
Not if RFK Jr. has anything to say about it.
Look at this fancy asshole who lives somewhere with good tap water
There are apparently 3500 cities in the US with water issues like Flynt, Michigan. I used to think the same, but after hearing that I do think I’d rather stick to other forms of water.
Just don’t try to drink the water in countries where the infrastructure is undeveloped. Or in Florida. Seriously, even if it’s “safe to drink,” if it has a high concentration of certain minerals it will make you sick if that’s not what you’re used to.
A related note: I desperately need people to stop trying to make the argument that bottled water is “just tap water in a bottle.” It’s filtered tap water. You’re paying for the filtration process that you don’t have at home for whatever reason. There’s a big difference between reverse osmosis and a Brita pitcher. People who have good tap water either need to share it or mind their own business about other people’s water drinking
there’s so much sediment in my local tap water you can chew it, my city has one of the highest occurrences of kidney stones because of how much hard sediment gets deposited by people drinking that shit. do not drink tap water
I still vividly remember when there was no such thing as “tap water.”
We just called it “water” back in my youth.
I think a lot of First Nations communities would disagree with you there.
It can make you sick though, my water is hard water and has been linked to a lot of stomach cancers.
What if the town you live in specifically tells you not to drink the water?
You definitely do not live in Arizona lol
There’s still A LOT of homes and buildings with lead pipes running the water mains. It was part of Biden’s infrastructure plan to replace them all but iirc Trump terminated that plan.
I agree and anyone who buys “spring water” or any of the other bottled waters is silly
For real. If tap water’s good enough to clean your hands/surfaces/bootyhole with, it’s good enough for drinking.
This depends on a lot of factors. The bottled water in my area tastes like nothing and my tap water tastes like shit.
Tap water in my little alaska town is from a lake that is fed by glacial melt.. Its the best tap water in the world.
Mmmm love that fluoride!!
Bottled water companies are making a killing.
Don’t understand why people spend so much money every year on bottled water when they can just turn on the tap at home.
That’s before we even get into the amount of plastic waste this causes too.
Duh but depends on location.
I drink tap; the best is to put refrigerator. But use a glass
Container
This is incredibly location dependant.
There are many places where tap water may not be trustworthy.
I trust mine though.
All water is tap water
I agree that tap water is fantastic but I’m lucky in that way, the only thing I really have to worry about in my country is how soft or hard it is, there are many places that don’t have that luxury, even with developed countries.
i only use RO water for drinking/cooking. pretty easy to install. i don’t care about losing “Trace” minerals since you can get them from other sources quite easily.
In developed countries yes. In Egypt? Fuck no.
It is categorically false that tap water has less taste than filtered water 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Every day I am thankful that I live in England where the tap water is drinkable and doesn’t taste like licking a stalagmite
I’ve only lived in one place where the tap water was questionable. That place was in the middle of the prairies, in a place that’s never had a great water source, and the modern system basically just chlorinates and recycles our waste water, mixing it with treated water from a small lake (read slough) so nasty that the government frequently forbids swimming and fishing in it. That tap water tasted like ass.
I now live somewhere where my tap water is pumped up from an aquifer fed by glacial runoff. That water is THE BEST. It’s still treated, but Jesus does it taste good.
Have you been to a water treatment plant and seen all the toxic chemicals they putting in that shit?
Well water.
Just because tap water is safe to drink doesn’t mean it tastes good
But if it does have a bad taste, that can often be solved with a water filter
We have tap water and it’s great. Much better tasting (as in no taste) than when I had well water.
The people of Flint, Michigan would beg to differ.
Not only unpopular but also wrong. Many places do not have safe tapwater… many places do not have good tapwater. My entire community is served by private wells. That means there’s a deep hole on my property with a pump at the bottom. That comes straight up into my house and into my water tank, completely untreated.
We don’t drink the water from the tap or use it to feed the baby or cats in my house but use it for most other things.
Tell that to flint, Michigan
Residents of Flint, Michigan would disagree.
Tap water, at least most that I’ve tried, tastes bad IMO. However filtered tap water (obviously considering it’s already “safe to drink”) is probably the ideal solution
I live in an area with “good” tap water, but it all tastes like crap right out of the sink. I either use a filtered pitcher or the water that went through the filter in my fridge.
Tell me you live in the first world but haven’t traveled to the third world without telling me you live in the first world but haven’t traveled to the third world.
This opinion isn’t unpopular in Scotland
This opinion isn’t unpopular in Scotland
People that buy bottled water when the tap is safe to drink need to have their heads examined. Most bottled water is just tap water.
My tap water tastes like pool water.
I don’t think too many would agruge, that yes that is ideal.
But unfortunately it’s not always feasible. Call it a first world problem I guess, but just for instance my grandparents live in a city where the tap water is safe to drink, but it tastes so foul that I won’t even drink a fountain soda from there because the horrible taste of the water is still the predominant flavor.
Where do you live? Maybe we SHOULD be able to do that, but many people in the world cannot. Try telling all that to the people in Flint, Michigan, USA.
I ain’t drinking city water but I’ll drink water from my spring -fed well.
In the same way that wine has a ‘terroir’ so does tap water. Travel the world and taste the different waters.
Hey man, glad the tap water where you personally live won’t make you sick.
Tons of people don’t get to have that
Tell that to the people being served by Thames Water Company…
The tap water here in Wisconsin is delicious
Tap water is fine until the city sends you a notice that the pipes they installed in 1950 may contain lead…
I had alkaline water cause I got it for free, that shit tasted so bad, it was like drinking bleach. Tap water ftw
Tell flint Michigan that
Location dependent but yes for a lot of people.
I live in a place with very high quality water. I know this for a fact. I’m an environmental scientist with a water testing lab.
I see people at the store all the time loading huge crates of single serve bottled water in their carts and I can’t understand why. The effort alone. Never mind the money.
The tap water where I live is amongst the best in the entire world. I’ve been drinking it all my life, never thought twice about it.
Tell that to the people of Flint, their water might still be toxic.
My tap water tastes like decaying infrastructure. I don’t even drink drinks at restaurants made with tap water or ice.
My cousin got a rare ass disease because she was too lazy to walk over to the water cooler and decided to drink the tap water by her desk. It was some old time disease that required the fucking health department to come to her job to investigate because it could start a huge outbreak real.
I put tap water through a brita filter because some family used to do water treatment and said the amount of chemicals they have to put into the water, you’d be better off filtering some of it, if you can.
But yes everyone should have good tap water regardless if you filter it more or not.
A lot of indigenous communities didn’t get good water since before the 90’s and still don’t.
Tap water at my house in the city is great. The tap water at my parents’ house in the country where I’m currently house sitting? No thank you! They have extremely hard water and got a water softener some years ago. The water is so hard, it takes so much salt, it just tastes like the damn ocean. The first time I house sat I figured I’d suck it up and drink the tap water; i last 2 maybe 3 days before switching to their bottled water — thankfully refillable gallon jugs, and not individual bottles.
I feel for places like Flint, MI (or those who have it worse.) I’m fortunate to have decent tap water.
Considering we have a water treatment facility down there road from me and two dead bodies were found in said water…HELL NO!
tap water has a weird taste to it.
its better after its filtered. therefore, filtered is better.
“Should” and “is” are incredibly different things. My tap water is certainly potable, but it’s gross. I installed a reverse osmosis filter in my kitchen, and it’s great
Flint, Michigan has entered the chat