Most of us already know that drinking tap water is cheaper than buying bottled water—and it’s better for the environment. National Geographic reports that the U.S. goes through 50 billion bottles of water per year, and 80% of the recyclable plastic containers end up in landfill.

But according to this infographic, bottled H2O is even more of a swindle than we realized.


First off, there’s the ridiculously inflated price. “Water, life’s most necessary substance, costs about three times more than gasoline when it comes in a plastic bottle,” reports

Quoting figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, the articles asserts that “the same $2 you spend on a liter of bottled water will get you about 1,000 gallons of tap water.”


But what’s worse is that you might be paying through the nose for essentially the same product that comes out of the faucet.

The infographic estimates that a whopping 40% of bottled water comes from the same source as tap—accordingly to ForbesNestlé has been sued twice for falsely representing bottled tap water as the product of a natural spring.

Read all the facts on the full infographic below, including the depressing point that it takes 450 years for one plastic water bottle to decompose. (Hear that? That’s the sound of Captain Planet’s tears falling on the cracked, dry ground of a cleared rainforest.)