This article was created in partnership with Brita.

Water is clearly part of a healthy routine—we’re made of it, we’re supposed to drink it, bad things happen when we don’t get enough of it. So naturally, with significant water-chugging quotas to meet, most people take the easy route and purchase plastic bottles, often by the case (so portable! so pristine!). But do you know the truth about where that water comes from and where those bottles end up?

We definitely didn’t. That’s why we are working with Brita to demystify the process and find a better way to get that H2O. One Brita® Longlast™ filter, for example, lasts up to six months* and removes 99 percent of lead and other sneaky impurities** for glass after glass of refreshing water straight from your faucet.

Unfortunately, the story of bottled water isn’t pretty, and it’s all too easy to ignore in favor of convenience. To hold your attention, we added pictures and a gripping storyline. Turns out bottled water isn’t the hero we hoped for. In fact, it’s quite the villain.

Brita Longlast *People around the world buy roughly 1 million bottles of water per minute. The oil it takes to make a year’s worth of water bottles in the U.S. alone is enough to fuel 1 million cars.

Sixty-four percent of all bottled water in the U.S. is actually tap water. Tap is not only 1,000 times cheaper than bottled water, but it consistently wins over bottled in taste tests.

*The Pacific Garbage Patch is a trash island double the size of Texas. It’s made up of garbage and unrecycled plastic floating in the ocean.

*Based on 120-gallon filter life and average family usage of 11 glasses per day.
**Certified by WQA. Substances reduced may not be in all users’ water.