Walk into any shopping mall, any movie theater, any public library. Chances are, you'll see more than one person clutching, dear to life, a disposable plastic bottle of water. As Americans, we consume 50 billion bottles of water each year. Bottled water is like a third arm to most of us; we don't think too much about bringing it everywhere with us, for every occasion.

But with increasing restrictions to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a global climate change crisis that seems far from improving, I've begun to ask myself whether or not bottled water is even useful, let alone necessary.

At the time of writing this, about 88% of tap water in America is safe for consumer consumption. The problem is that the other 12% seems to be giving public tap water in the U.S. a bad name. Unless you are living in Flint, or somewhere else with similarly terrible drinking water (*coughRowanUniversitycough*), you should definitely be drinking from the tap.

For starters, tap water is a lot cheaper than bottled water: 300 times cheaper, to be specific. Drinking eight glasses of water a day (the figure purportedly recommended by healthcare professionals, though which is likely baseless) costs $0.49 per year from the tap, but $1,200 when consumed entirely from bottles. And "more expensive" doesn’t even make bottled water necessarily safer. Bottlers such as Dasani (a Coke imprint) and Aquafina (a Pepsi imprint) commodify literally what comes out of local pipes, and though it does go through a secondary purification process, it's not much different from what most of us have at home. (Aquafina removes all minerals, while Dasani adds them back for taste - if you were ever wondering why Aquafina tastes… like that.)

The environmental impact that bottling has is virtually unchecked. And this isn't even about the plastic used. It's about the act of pumping huge quantities of water out of its original habitat, and redistributing it all across the country. Though this has been shown by independent studies to have a negative impact on the habitats from which the water is taken (such as Poland, Maine, the town for which Poland Spring-brand water is named), many bottling companies with permits from the town aren't required by law to abide by the studies of independent researchers. Instead, they only have to listen to hydrogeologists that they themselves hire, and who rarely pay attention to the impacts of pumping on a whole-ecosystem scale.

Considering that most bottled water in America is sold by Nestle, a Swiss company and the largest food company in the world, they can afford to hire enough lawyers and enough lobbyists to ensure that they have few environmental transgression to answer for and that they can screw over local communities in the process.

While there are issues with water purification subsidized by the EPA in America (for example, the fact that our government allows any measure of lead to enter water at all), the problem will always come back to money. The budget for the EPA is experiencing drastic cuts from a government that's intent on cutting something, but can only think of the EPA as the first non-necessary agency.

Many Americans do not understand that the EPA does a lot more than just offer ominous omens about a nefarious hole in the ozone layer. The EPA is in charge of making sure that the water that we put into our bodies, and that our loved ones put into their bodies, is drinkable. They make sure - or try to make sure - that every man, woman, and child in this nation is drinking water that is not straight pesticides, antifreeze, and sewage. You would think that this most basic of all health concerns would be important to most Americans.

But the EPA is still the first to go when it comes time to crunch numbers.

One potential solution comes in the form of a Singaporean public utility venture called NEWater. Through this system, sewage water is treated to the point where it comes out cleaner than most tap water in the U.S. Yes, it sounds gross, but there are far fewer bacteria - none - found in NEWater than in local reservoir water. It's a system that seems to be working well for Singapore, a country that cares enough to invest in its environmental infrastructure.

When will the U.S. care enough to invest in our future?

The best that we can do to fix our public drinking situation is to have faith in the EPA, in order to spur increased funds for their filtration process. But that show of faith requires us to actually drink the water, and with enough health-related reasons not to, this entire situation becomes a catch-22 of how we would prefer to die: killing ourselves by consuming industrial waste, or killing our planet by continuing the irresponsible extraction of water for unnecessary bottling.

Priorities need to be established. Our government needs to let us know where it stands on these important issues. There can be no more hiding from the truth of what lurks just under the surface.

Now it's just a matter of whether we sink, or we swim.

This article has been inspired by the book "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It" by Elizabeth Royte, which I highly recommend highly.