Water purification systems come in all sizes and types from large household units to a small bottle with filter inside. However, most systems are not practical outside the house.

As an alternative to filtering tap, many people purchase bottled water when they are on the go, believing that it is safer and purer. This belief is often unsubstantiated: bottled water is only required to be as safe as tap water, not safer or better, so there may be no difference in quality.

Bottled water is also expensive, and when you purchase it, almost all of your money is paying for the packaging and advertising of the product, not the product itself. Millions of these bottles clutter up the landscape every year and contribute a significant amount of garbage to our environment.

As an alternative, a water filter bottle allows you access to a constant supply of purified drinking water. You can treat just the amount you need and not have to worry about carrying around large amounts of increasingly warm H2O. Plus, the purifier unit is cost-effective. A typical bottle with filter system costs roughly $40-$60 for the unit and a year's worth of cartridges. This amount would purchase about 30 bottles of water, which only equals about two per month, well under most people's average consumption.

However, you might ask, “Why purchase a water filter bottle when what comes out of the faucet is safe?” It is true that our public water is much more preferable to what people in other countries and other times have had to drink, but this does not mean that it isn't as safe as it could be. It is important to remember that water is cyclic, continually being absorbed and released – new water is never created. As our world becomes more p