| Last week, I slunk into the grocery store and bought products to create a display for the Cook for Good table at the Women on the Move forum. The point was to show how expensive and inconvenient to buy bottled or canned drinks.
The twelve-pack of bottled "iced" tea cost $6.93. Each bottle held 16.9 fluid ounces of tea. I did the math and found that I could make the same amount of tea using a national brand of tea bags for only 54 cents! That's a savings of $6.39 for boiling a little water.
bottled tea and tea bags
Of course, brewing tea at home gives you several other advantages. You not only save money, you help save the planet. That 12-pack of tea weighs a whopping 14 pounds, 8 ounces. Six tea bags, including their share of a 24-bag box, weigh just under 8 ounces.
Picking tea bags over bottled tea for just one 12 pack means you didn't haul 14 pounds of water and plastic off the shelf, into your cart, up onto the register, out to the car or bus, and then into your home. Precious oil wasn't used to make the plastic bottles, transport them, or send them to the recycler or landfill either.
The difference is even more striking with water. I bought a 12 pack of 12-ounce bottles of water for $4.58. When I figured out how much that would have cost coming from the tap, I was astounded. Only one third of one cent! Drinking tap water is the next best thing to free.
I can understand people buying bottled water if they live where the water tastes or smells bad. But where I live, companies bottle our city tap water and sell it back for an enormous markup to the people who live here.
Bottled water is often filtered. But that may not be good for your teeth. The Center for Disease Control says:
If you mainly drink bottled water with no or low fluoride and you are not getting enough fluoride from other sources, you may get more cavities than you would if fluoridated tap water were your main water source.
Read more, including health benefits of water & tea and tips for making the most of it, on CookforGood.com. |
